RPFF - Riga Pasaules Film Festival

Filming Bodies: Bodies Filming

The RIGA PASAULES FILM FESTIVAL (RPFF) will celebrate its 7th edition with a new cycle of film screenings, workshops, a retrospective, and discussions. The film festival will take place from the 23rd - 26th April 2020 at Kino Bize, located in the heart of Riga’s Art Nouveau district.

The curating team of RPFF’s 2020 edition is calling for cinema works, of a broad anthropological persuasion, that engage with the cinematic experience of the sensuous body. We are looking for works that, through their content or form: address the ways in which the filmmaker’s body is integral to the process of filmmaking; offer a creative engagement with the politics of the body; and that address the viewers’ corporeal capabilities.

We are interested in works that shift focus from the human gaze to the experience of the sensuous body, and its non-discursive ways of relating. The body can also refer to a non-
human physical presence (machine, animal, plant, etc.).

Some of the themes we are interested in:

-- The body of the filmmaker, touching on how recording devices embody the filmmaker’s physical presence, how the filmmaker’s moving body frames a situation, and how material produced by filmmaking equipment goes beyond the “audiovisual”.

-- The ethics of the filmed body. What ethical and political values are at stake when the body is submitted to cinematic enquiry? To what degree is filmmaking an empathetic practice that can promote alternatives to hegemonic understandings of the corporeal experience of the Other, or the peculiar gaze incorporated in scopophilic practices?

-- The viewer’s haptic sensibility and the embodied experience of watching films. How film engages with the viewer’s senses and offers a complex multi-sensorial experience?

We welcome submissions that have been produced since 2017 and would like to encourage first time filmmakers and students to submit.

We are a small independent film festival in a small art-house cinema, and as funding decreases every year in real terms our submission fee is a lifeline that helps ensure that we can stage our festival to the highest standard we can. We aim to create screening conditions that enable a lively, shared viewing experience as well as giving space for thorough reflection.

The submission deadline is December 22, 2019.
Information about the event: www.kinobize.lv/rpff