Rīga International Film Festival to include Ukrainian strand, Pasolini retrospective

Take note – story published 1 year ago

The Riga International Film Festival (RIGA IFF), which is returning this autumn for the ninth time with an extensive film programme and a wide range of industry events, has announced this year's theme and presented the visual identity that wil be used.

The festival will take place from 13 to 23 October and will offer its audiences a diverse cinematic experience.

The program includes six competitions and will be shown in over 100 screenings in Rīga and throughout Latvia (both in person and online). The festival will also feature a program of events organised in collaboration with Kyiv Critics' Week that will include a selection of contemporary Ukrainian cinema and an international panel discussion series on post-colonialism in the media space.

This year, RIGA IFF has chosen to base its visual identity around a line from a poem by the Italian director and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini, who is the focus of the festival's retrospective programme: "The sweet chaos of daily good and evil". 

From June 8, the festival will be offering a limited number of 10-ticket packages at a special discounted price, as well as a festival pass that will allow holders to attend any RIGA IFF screening – in person and online.

Confirmed movies so far include Mikhaël Hers’ Passengers of the Night, that screened in competition at Berlinale, in which Charlotte Gainsbourg deals with the twists and turns of life via the radio waves; award-winning Eami from the Rotterdam International Film Festival, which poetically depicts a five-year-old Ayoreo girl's relationship with a vanishing forest and its inhabitants; Godland that played in competition at the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard section, which follows a young Danish priest’s harsh journey as a missionary in 19th-century Iceland and is directed by Hlynur Pálmason (A White, White Day, 2019) in collaboration with actor Ingvar Sigurdsson.

Icelandic film Beautiful Beings, which screened at Berlinale, offers an unusual mix of mysticism and exploration of intergenerational violence with a twisted view of adolescent masculinity, while Amanda Kramer's Please Baby Please is a surprising gender-deconstructing psychedelic musical. Hatching, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, pulls back the curtains on the idyllic family image on social media. This Finnish body horror was made together with Latvian film studio Mistrus Media and in cooperation with many local film professionals.

Other parts of the program will be announced gradually throughout the summer.

RIGA IFF receives support from the State Culture Capital Foundation, the National Film Centre, and Creative Europe MEDIA.

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