BEAST connects audiences and film in different venues in Porto

During confinement, BEAST International Film Festival took to the online platform to connect audiences and film, receiving as much as ten thousand views. With the easing of the restrictive measures, cinema lovers can experience in-person cinema screenings in different venues in the city, between 29th April and 3rd June.

The festival, which is coproduced by the OKNA cultural Association, jointly with Porto City Hall and Filmin Portugal, the independent cinema platform in Portugal, puts forward experimental films, with Romania as the focus country for this edition. The acclaimed documentary “Ivana The Terrible” premieres the opening session. The film narrates the story of the leading artist, who lives in Bucharest, to her hometown. This is the second feature film by Ivana Mladenović.

The BEAST programming features 16 screenings that gather the highlights of the online format and another BEAST originals. The film screening marathon starts on Cinema Passos Manuel, with the feature film “Ivana The Terrible”, by Ivana Mladenović. Passos Manuel will feature cinema sessions every Thursday during the festival.

BEAST IFF will take to the Espaço Cultural Maus Hábitos on 5th and 12Th May to celebrate film with free screening of awarded short and medium length films.

The programme also includes other sessions devoted to documentaries such as “Acasa, My Home”, awarded at the Sundance festival, last year; also, “The Distance Between Me and Me”, by the duo Dana Bunescu and Mona Nicoară, who resorted to archived images and videos, as well as other material as poems and surveillance footage, by the secret police, to remake the iconic life of Romanian artist Nina Cassian; time to see “The Soviet Garden”, as well, a documentary by Dragos Turea that unfolds the drama of people affected by the Soviet industrial way of living and the consequences that people from Moldavia had to endure.

On 6th and 8th May, time to head to the Casa das Artes and two sessions of the Portuguese Abroad programme.

Other venues in Porto that will host the BEAST International Film Festival are the Cinema Trindade, the Café Candelabro and the Livraria Térmita.