Short Films and Media Arts By Emerging Creatives: ifva Festival 2019

Description

Founded in 1995, ifva is an incubator for Film & Visual media in Asia, actively promoting and encouraging creative talents in Asia who make short films, videos, animation and interactive media.

The 24th edition of the ifva festival will kick off on March 6 with media art exhibition CINEMA 2.0: Acrylic Dreams, which discusses cinema as a medium of modern-day myths, and exhibition of the festival’s Media Arts Category finalist works. One of the works exhibited at the former will be Oil, an installation that crushes visitors’ belongings, transforms them into sound and burns it onto discs for them to take away.

The festival will screen 50 short films, selected out of 796 applications, across five themed screenings held between 7 and 16 March. The screenings are as follows:

The Open Category screens submissions that probe the various relationships between people in addition to that between people and the city; short films on issues such as school bullying, animal abuse, academic pressure, are foregrounded in the Youth Category; The Animation Category celebrates innovative animated shorts; and Asian New Force Category features films that tackle issues such as gender, family, politics and welfare.

New this year is the Filmorphosis programme, which aims to recognise established filmmakers who persist in their creative paths. The first programme features Ten Years (十年) director and ifva alumnus Wong Fei-pang, whose socially conscious oeuvre encompasses a wide variety of genres and styles. The festival will screen An Odd Fish, Wong’s debut feature, and five of his short films, to demonstrate his  creative evolution over the years.