Culture

BEAST International Film Festival 4th edition takes to the online platforms

  • Article

    Article

DR_BEAST_International_Film_Festival.jpg

DR

BEAST, the festival from Porto that showcases films by Eastern Europe filmmakers and Portuguese directors, who reside outside the country, will be held online, in partnership with the Streaming Filmin platform. This year, BEAST is devoted to Romania and kicks off on 24th march, and runs until 4th April.

Experimental films remain the hallmark of BEAST, which will take to the digital platform owing to the pandemic restrictions in place. The festival is presented by the OKNA cultural Association and, for five days, it will provide a digital film experience, jointly with Filmin Portugal, the independent cinema platform in Portugal.

Romania is the focus country this edition and 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 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.

BEAST also features the competitive sessions "EastWave", "EastDoc" and “experimentalEAST”, which include short and medium footage by emerging young talents. Ones to watch are the Slovenian short film "Sh_t Happens", "Pure Art", and "Aleph Zeta (XVII): The Star".

These categories, alongside with the “V4 Screen” programme will be available until 4th April for Filmin Portugal subscribers, or by pay-per-view format within the platform.

Concurrently, Vimeo, YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and Instagram will host other categories, events, live streams and Q&A of the Festival.

Following March, the BEAST festival extends until 1st June, with monthly special screenings and the third edition of “Visegrad Film Hub”, devoted to the countries that are part of the Visegrado Group. This edition will also feature other screenings, master classes and workshops, in an online format, and, if pandemic preventive measures thus permit, an in-person event will be held in spaces in the city, namely Cinema da Trindade, Cinema Passos Manuel, Casa das Artes and the Almeida Garrett Municipal Library.