“WITNESSING HISTORY: A GLOBAL DIARY” IFA Film Festival

In these challenging times, our planet is facing, we believe an opportunity for change has arrived. Let's rethink together the consequences of our choices.

International Filmmaking Academy from Bologna, Italy, together with filmmakers from throughout the world, invites you to take part in our upcoming initiative:
POCKETS OF LIGHT: Growing from the Crisis.

"There'll be these "pockets of light" springing up in different parts of the world. There have to be centers, now, where people can come and reconstruct a new future for the world. These centers are growing up everywhere now! These things can't be given names, but in a way, these are all attempts at creating a new kind of school. And the purpose is to find out how to preserve the light, life, the culture. How to keep things living. You see, I keep thinking that what we need is a new language, a language of the heart. Some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry, that's the poetry of the dancing bee that tells us where the honey is. And I think that in order to create that language, you're going to have to learn how you can go through a looking glass into another kind of perception, where you have that sense of being united to all things. And suddenly, you understand everything."
- Louis Malle, My dinner with André.

The IFA festival becomes an action towards preserving memory and arousing awareness to which we are called to contribute. It is critically important that the humanity understands this moment and brings its learnings to future generations.

IFA respects the 17 goals from the United Nations. (https://sdgs.un.org/goals)

Filmmakers creatively express their personal experiences and responses to the world emergency and its developments, by producing a short film of 5–10 minutes. Any form is accepted: diary, memoire, documentary, fiction, experimental, animation or hybrid.

The film should embrace the filmmakers’ cinematic vision, their cultural frame, and their emotions aroused by what is happening in their culture. In these weeks the space around us is shrinking, while time expands to the extreme: a condition that opens up new glimpses of creativity and reaction.

During an emergency we are all connected, fragile and equally at risk. The individual is nothing but himself/herself. No longer producer-consumer, no longer customer, public, audience. With nothing but our primary needs, we return to be human beings. Time belongs to us, it is the measure that coincides with our existence.

Humanity has a possibility to set new priorities, decisions, choices and to evolve as it’s more aware of its fragility, interconnections and the transience of life. We have the chance to fulfill the highest, truest expression of ourselves.