Programme for 36th Göteborg International Film Festival is here!

This year the Göteborg International Film Festival will be larger than ever. The programme includes almost 500 films from 84 countries and more than a thousand screenings at 23 different venues. Moreover, the festival-goers will have a variety of seminars, parties, concerts, clubs, food events and exhibitions to choose from during the intense 11-day festival. Here follows a quick rundown on the programme, which you can browse in its entirety here.

Honorary Dragon Award to Margarethe von Trotta



Margarethe von Trotta is one of Germany’s most important directors of all time with films such as The German Sisters, Rosa Luxemburg and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum among her merits. Along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, Margarethe von Trotta was one of the main filmmakers of the New German Cinema in the 1970s. She is renowned for the down-to-earth portrayals of relationships and the feminist combativeness in her films. All this makes her the ideal recipient of this year’s Honorary Dragon Award—the festival’s annual award to a filmmaker whose works deserve extra attention. The festival will screen The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum and von Trotta’s new film Hannah Arendt, a portrait of one of the 20th century’s most important philosophers and political theorists. Margarethe von Trotta will talk about her work at a Master Class.



Margarethe von Trotta will be visiting the festival 26-28/1

 

One of the world’s largest film awards



Göteborg International Film Festival’s award for best Nordic film, Dragon Award Best Nordic Film, has a prize sum of one million SEK (app. 110 000 EUR). The award is one of the largest in the world and is distributed at the Dragon Awards Gala, on Saturday, February 2. Danish Tobias Lindholm’s film A Hijacking, Swedish Fredrik Edfeldt’s film Faro and Norwegian Sara Johnsen’s All that Matters is Past starring Maria Bonnevie, are three of the eight nominated films.



Last year’s winner of the Dragon Award Best Nordic Film and hence one million SEK was Norwegian Company Orheim by Arild Andresen.



Dragon Award Best Nordic Film is presented by Ernströmgruppen and is co-funded by Ernströmgruppen, Västra Götaland and the City of Gothenburg.



Read more about the nominated films.

The Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award



The Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award is awarded to new talent within international cinematography. The competing films are the directors first or second feature. In 2012, the prize went to Alice Rohrwachers film Corpo Celeste. Among the nominees this year is Wadjda by Haifa Al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia’s first female director. The film is about ten-year Wadjda, a determined girl who in contrast to her country’s norms, dares to dream about a bicycle. al-Mansour is one of the guests at GIFF. Another nominee is the Israeli director Rama Burshtein and her film Fill the Void, a story that gives an insight into a strictly religious world in Tel Aviv. She will also be visiting the festival.



Read more about the award and all the nominees here.

New prize for the Best Nordic Documentary



Eight new documentary films have been nominated for the new prize Dragon Award Best Nordic Documentary, awarded at the Dragon Awards Gala Saturday, February 2.

Among the nominees are Linda Västrik’s Forest of the Dancing Spirits

and Stefan Jarl’s new film The Goodness. Documentary filmmaker Mia Engberg’s film Belleville Baby, is a poetic portrayal of a personal story. In No Burqas Behind Bars the director Nima Sarvestani travels to a women’s prison in Afghanistan.



Read more about the nominated films here.

Gala films!



Much-awaited feature films can be found in the gala section. The festival will sneak start Thursday 24 January with Kathrym Bigelow’s controversial thriller, Zero Dark Thirty, about the hunt for Osama bin Ladin. The Norwegian feature film and Oscar contribution, Kon-Tiki, will open the festival 25 January. In the Danish psychological drama, The Hunt, Mads Mikkelsen plays a wrongly accused child care professional, a performance that resulted in him receiving Cannes’ award for Best Actor. The filmatisation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is a costume drama starring Keira Knightly and Alicia Vikander among others. Dustin Hoffman makes his directorial debut with Quartet, a charming comedy about aging actors and divas. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is Mira Nair’s film adaptation of the novel of the same name, about a successful Pakistani in the USA, who after September 11 is burdened with societal prejudice. Anthony Hopkins provides a terrific portrait of one of the world’s most influential directors in Hitchcock. And finally, Final Cut: Ladies and Gentlemen, an excellent montage film with cuts from love scenes from 450 films - a parade of stars and entertaining mingle for cineastes.

Focus: Chile



In Chile, four decades have passed since Pinochet's military coup d'état. The film industry has recovered and there is a new wave amongst young Chilean filmmakers. At GIFF, we screen eleven films that together provide a picture of this new exciting film production. Among them is Esteban Larraín’s The Passion of Michelangelo, a drama based on a true story about a miracle boy who gets a peculiar role in the midst of the most intense people’s protests. Larraín is one of the Festival’s guests, as well as Dominga Sotomayor who visits us with her debut film Thursday Till Sunday.



See previous press release on Focus: Chile here.

Inside Iran



Since the Green Revolution started in Iran in 2009, it has become even tougher to be a filmmaker in the country. Despite this the creativity continues to thrive. Inside Iran, which is a unique collaboration with the film festival in Rotterdam, shows a selection of new films that reflect the complex conditions. One of them is Ziba, where a housewife from the upper classes represents the repression and enforced silence that many Iranians are living with today. Director Bani Khoshnoudi is a guest at the festival. Also visiting is Nahid Persson Sarvestani who shows her film My Stolen Revolution, a painful history in which she creates a picture of her assassinated brother’s last time in life.

Swedish premieres



The Swedish section of the programme will see the world premiere of three feature films, five documentaries and SVT’s new drama series Molander, with actors such as Eric Ericson, Livia Millhagen and Jonas Karlsson.



In the feature film Reliance, William Olsson gives a compelling picture of a society where security is threatened from within. In this year’s closing film Crestfallen, Tuva’s (Josephine Bornebusch) learns that she’s adopted and decides to find her biological mother. Johan Lundh’s feature debut is a suggestive drama thriller.