International festival favourites, a fresh take on the international series competition and the world debut of an installation by Jean-Michel Jarre, exemplify the Geneva International Film Festival’s mission to investigate and celebrate audiovisual content in all its guises.
“Our goal for audiences and international participants alike is to reinforce the interaction with content and the cinematographic experience for film, series and also digital creation,” says artistic director Anais Emery, who is overseeing her third edition. “I hope the audience will get curious about this diversity of audiovisual offerings.”
Emery is determined to drag audiences out of their content comfort zones created by algorithm-generated “suggested for you” menus.
One of this year’s biggest names for the event is Jarre. Recently appointed president of the commission for digital creation for the CNC in France this year, the man famous for staging mega concerts complete with laser displays, projects, fireworks and electronic, ambient and new-age tunes, will pick up one of the festival’s three honorary plaudits, fittingly named the Film and Beyond award, and deliver a masterclass on his work and creative methods.
“We have the world premiere of [large scale installation] The Eye And I, which [Jarre] created with Taiwanese artist, Hsin-Chien Huang,” Emery says. “Jarre is now a VR creator. It is great to have such a wonderful artist following trends and looking for new ways to tell stories.”
Hsin-Chien Huang is flying in from Taiwan to support the world premiere.
“This third edition will go ever further to position GIFF as a festival that encompasses different formats and fluidity,” notes Emery.
Other honorary prizes will go to the Kourtrajme school, a growing artist collective, founded by Ladj Ly in the 1990s and to Swiss invention the Nagra, a portable recorder, with Nagra board member Marguerite Kudelski set to pick up the plaudit.
Story arc
The festival boasts 110 works, of which 53 are films, 27 are series, 28 are immersive experiences and two are installations at time of writing. Further installations may be added.
GIFF includes four competition sections: international feature, international series, international immersive and the convergent competition – the latter section featuring projects from all three formats.
Emery and team have tweaked the international series competition strand making all 10 series available in their entirety through a hybrid presentation format, the first episodes in cinemas then making the rest of the series available through personalised viewing links. Titles include the international premieres of Teenage Kiss: The Future Is Dead and Adriano Cappelletta’s Australian series In Our Blood.
“A series is a story arc written over one full season. For us it was important that the audience could get access to that, because a series is not complete unless you understand how the season is written, constructed, structured, and this is where the series are interesting in terms of storytelling,” Emery says.
It was complicated to do the rights’ deal and made negotiations longer but Emery believes the move sets GIFF apart.
All 12 titles in the international feature competition are Swiss premieres. Films include Polite Society by Screen Star of Tomorrow 2021 Nida Manzoor, which launched at Sundance in January; and Sean Price Williams’ Cannes Directors’ Fortnight entry The Sweet East starring Talia Ryder. Filmmaker Stephanie Chuat will head the jury, alongside a selection of film students.
The festival opens today (November 3) with Quentin Dupieux’s Daaaaaali!, about a French journalist who meets the iconic surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and closes with Japanese filmmaker Kore-Eda Hirokazu’s Monster on November 11.
“I’m really fond of the opening and closing films of the festival that are really significant to our relationship to cinema with great storytellers and different modes of expression,” Emery says.
The Geneva Digital Market (GDM), the only event in Switzerland focused on audiovisual innovation, runs November 6 - 10. It includes workshops and discussions on artificial intelligence and its role in the industry.
“As an artistic director, I think there are many issues with AI. I think it’s an interesting tool, and one that is already here,” says Emery. “A deeper knowledge will help the creative communities to come up with what they consider is a sustainable and ethical use of AI and what is not.”
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