TRUST to the 13th 2008 Faludi International Youth Film Fest and Photo Competition

The 13th Faludi International Youth Film Festival and Photo Competition that took place this weekend in Budapest seems to be growing one with the youth of the city it takes place in. Each year the festival is a place where young non-professionals and film students gather to showcase their art and indulge in the love of movie-making without the ostentatiousness of the professional industry.

The festival’s objective was to receive and screen “professionally demanding elaborated works, which are suitable for creating a forum, in the language of pictures, for the dialogue of different viewpoints and opinions”, according to the organizers. This year’s theme was “Trust” and all the films and photos submitted to the festival had to, in some way, deal with this concept.

Altogether there were 102 films from 16 different countries shown as part of the festival in the short feature film, experimental film and documentary sections, 45 of which took part in the competition and 57 presented at informative screenings.

The event, however, is not simply a film festival or a photo competition: other than these two components of the festival there were exhibitions, roundtable discussions, conferences and following the fest there will even be a one-week retrospective of the films of the Italian director Pupi Avati, who chaired this year’s jury of the film section. In addition to all this, a selection of the best films of some Hungarian and international film festivals were shown, too.

Being a film director, producer and screenwriter, Bologna-born Giuseppe Avati is in the industry of filmmaking for 40 years. His first movie was Blood Relations (Balsamus, l'uomo di Satana) in 1968 and since then he directed over 30 films of which several have been nominated for the Golden Palm and the Golden Bear Awards of the Cannes and Berlin film festivals.

Members of the film section jury included Ákos Lázár Kovács aesthete, Judit Pintér film critic, Attila Mispál film director, and András Nagy cinematographer.

In the experimental category, the German Sebastian Natto and Denis Trümbach won the first prize with their film “Relevé”. Serbian Attila Ivan’s “Who or what I used to be?” received first place in the documentary section, and in the third category of short feature films a Romanian film called “Flirt” by Rita Both was given the award. In the section for film students, the main prize of the category went to Hüseyin Tabak from Germany for his films “Cheeese...”.
by Brigitta Bokor