Visionär Film Festival is back with exciting surprises!

Visionär Film Festival is thrilled to announce its third edition taking place from the 3rd to the 7th of April at ACUDkino.

The program offers an international selection of nine first or second feature films in Competition for the Audience and Jury Awards (all Berlin or German premieres), one movie Out of Competition, a selection of Short Films made by Berlin filmmakers for the Audience Award, a Homage to a well-established director and a Film Concert under the name of Kino Sonico.

The festival pursues an international as well as local orientation: The aim is to support and connect emerging young filmmakers from all over the world and young filmmakers from Berlin, and to promote an exchange between them and the public. Visionär sees itself as an interdisciplinary, transnational platform for the encounter of actors in the fields of visual art, film and music.

Visionär believes and respects gender equality and gender inclusivity in its selection. This year it actually presents more female* and non-binary directors than male ones. In an industry that doesn’t always make it so easy for women, in a world in which it’s still necessary to impose the “pro film quote” in order to assure their presence, Visionär is very proud to contribute support to women. 

Visionär seeks to reach filmmakers and film lovers of all generations, to assemble a wide range of experiences, stories and aesthetics without being tied to specific thematic selection criteria. On the contrary, the chosen films generate points of friction that are both aesthetically and content conscious: they are diverse, heterogeneous, sometimes contradictory, always surprising and therefore very exciting. Once again, they show the diversity of the medium of film.

This year’s edition takes on different topics, including: Social classes clashes and the dis-illusion of a new possible society; the loss of our beloved ones, that might take someone to move and make a film on it, and someone else to create an uncertain kind of family; the role of women and the exploration of femininity in a still patriarchal society which doesn’t deny its stereotypes and abuses; the lucha of a queer body fiercely opposing his own farewell and farewells that a city like Berlin paves the way of… and much more! Stories and images will take the audience on a journey through Argentina, Canada, Chile, Finland, France, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Italy and Spain.

On duty call to judge our nine feature films and assign the Jury Award are: Love Enqvist (Artist), Jürgen Brüning (Producer), Beatrice Fiorentino (Film Critic, part of the selection committee for the International Critics’ Week in Venice). Also, the audience is called to serve as a judge for both the full-length and short film selections.

The opening night this year will be rich of events.

With the support of the Embassy of Canada, this year Visionär will pay homage to the Canadian underground director Bruce LaBruce. As one of the fathers of queercore, a cultural and social movement that began in the mid-1980s (as an offshoot of punk), he stated his discontent with society’s disapproval of the gay, bisexual, lesbian and transgender communities.

His first and seminal film No Skin Off My Ass will kick off the festival, at the presence of his producer Jürgen Brüning.  No Skin Off My Ass is a low-rent semi-remake of Robert Altman’s That Cold Day in the Park – with LaBruce himself taking the Sandy Dennis role. It’s shot on grainy Super 8 blown up to 16mm, with LaBruce’s exaggeratedly emotive voiceover scoring the action. It already contains what would become the basic LaBrucian template, explicit sex and offbeat comedy intertwine with radical politics.

Under the name of Kino Sonico, Visionär present one of Stan Brakhage’s short films on a live performance by Frau W. Brakhage was an American non-narrative filmmaker, one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental film. He explored a variety of formats, approaches and techniques that included handheld camerawork, painting directly onto celluloid, fast cutting, in-camera editing, scratching on film, collage film and the use of multiple exposures. Themes of birth, mortality, sexuality and innocence were very much investigated by him. Marion Wörle aka Frau W is a computer musician and graphic designer based in Berlin. She plays solo, in ad-hoc ensembles and co-founded the ensemble gamut inc., consisting of a growing number of autonomous music robots, which are controlled from computer. She writes music for film, music theatre and radio plays.

Furthermore, in collaboration with the 21. Semana del Cortometraje and Film Madrid, three short films supported by the Madrid Region Government will be presented to the Berlin audience, while three of our short films will be shown in Madrid: Cerdita (Piggy) by Carlota Pereda (Best Live-Action Short Ffilm at the 2019 Goya Awards), Ato San Nen by Pedro Collantes, Domesticado (Domesticated) by Juan Francisco Viruega.

 A special event will close Visionär: the film La Lucina directed by Jonny Costantino and Fabio Badolato and inspired by the homonymous novel by Antonio Moresco. Moresco, also acting in the film, is one of the founding fathers of a new line of Italian literature that moves beyond post-modernity, and likened to Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. He has been described by Roberto Saviano as “a literary patrimony”. The screening will be introduced by Hanna Schygulla (Berlin Silver Bear for Best Actress for The Marriage of Maria Braun by R. W. Fassbinder, Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress for the Marco Ferreri film The Story of Piera). After the screening, the Berlin-based Sicilian singer and composer Etta Scollo will sing a song live, dedicated to this film. 

Feature Films:

  1. No Skin Off My Ass by Bruce LaBruce (Canada, 1991) | Opening Ceremony – Out of Competition
  2. Bad Bad Winter by Olga Korotko (Kazakhstan, France, 2018)
  3. Cassandro The Exotico! by Marie Losier (France, 2018)
  4. Distances (Las Distancias) by Elena Trapé (Spain, 2018)
  5. Impetus by Jennifer Alleyn (Canada, 2018)
  6. Julia and the Fox (Julia y el Zorro) by Inés María Barrionuevo (Argentina, 2018)
  7. M by Anna Eriksson (Finland, 2018)
  8. One Day (Egy Nap) by Zsofia Szilagyi (Hungary, 2018)
  9. Potential Victim (Victima Potencial) by Nicolás Guzmán (Chile, 2018)
  10. Too Late to Die Young (Tarde para morir joven) by Dominga Sotomayor (Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Netherlands, Qatar, 2018)
  11. La Lucina by Fabio Badolato and Jonny Costantino (Italy, 2018) | Closing Ceremony – Out of Competition

Short Films by Berlin filmmakers:

  1. A Mythology of Pleasure (Una mitología placentera) by Lara Rodríguez Cruz
  2. A true story by Marlies Pahlenberg
  3. Accepdance by Mayté Richter
  4. Anniversary (Salveger) by Angelica Germanà Bozza
  5. C(h)at (Chat) by Clementine Decremps
  6. Comments by Jannis Alexander Kiefer
  7. Eau De Toilette by Arman Grigoryan
  8. Happy Birthday by Savio Debernardis
  9. Home? By Elliot Blue
  10. In Dog Years I’m Dead by Kenji Ouellet
  11. Man on Blue (Mann Auf Blau) by Friedrich Tiedtke
  12. Monday –  A German Love Story by Sophie Linnenbaum
  13. Rumours by Nicole Aebersold
  14. Summer Saturn (Verão Saturno) by Mónica Lima
  15. Sweet discomfort of missed connections ( سلسلة اختفات وعلاقات غير مريحة ) by Hussen Ibraheem
  16. The most peculiar and human of all expressions (Wenn Angst die Arme vor deinem Verstand verschlägt) by Scarlett Nimz
  17. The Players (Die Spieler) by Samuel Auer
  18. Tracing Addai by Esther Niemeier
  19. Ugly Butterflies (Nachtfalter) by Lasse Holdhus
To VFF 2019