The Riga International Film Festival (RIGA IFF), which will celebrate its tenth anniversary from 12 to 22 October, is announcing the programme of the festival’s Short Film International Competition. The four screenings include 24 short films – animated, narrative, documentary, and experimental – that challenge the audience and reveal the filmmakers’ signature styles. 

The RIGA IFF Short Film Programme is curated by French curator and film critic Léo Soesanto. Under his guidance, the selection committee has chosen films that represent a rich medley of contemporary cinematic practices and which interact boldly with audiences today. The films include vivid and unique interpretations of displacement, alienation, posthuman condition, and the death of cinema itself. The Short Film International Competition programme is divided into four screenings: No Home Movies, Music for Magicians, What Did You Do? and Before and After Humanity. The entire competition programme will be screened both in person at cinema Forum Cinemas, where you will be able to meet the filmmakers after screenings, and online throughout Latvia.

In a competition that is varied in terms of colours, impressions, genres and textures, the filmmakers have focused on themes of home and belonging, the vocabulary of cinematic techniques, the changing faces of humanity and its relationship with technology. RIGA IFF is honored that amongst the films are shorts that will have different kinds of premiers at the festival: audiences will experience a modernised, sensual interpretation of Boccaccio’s short story from collection of tales Decameron in the short film The Convent Gardener (world premiere) and Hungarian director Daniel Nagy’s fusion of Dogme ’95 aesthetics and home video in his atmospherically relaxed work The Bath (international premiere). 

The RIGA IFF Short Film International Competition will also feature the international premieres of Finnish director Saarlotta Virri’s exploration of collective imagination In the Midst of Chaos There Was Shape and the Super Mario computer game-inspired short film Bye Bye Bowser. Additionally, the festival will screen a few European premieres: the experimental short film The Despair of Monkeys and the melodrama The Color of the Room by award-winning short and feature filmmaker Iván Löwenberg, about a man diagnosed on the autism spectrum and his relationship with his mother, which is destined to change forever.

Several internationally acclaimed short films will also be screened, such as the close-up of a young footballer’s psyche which was included in the Berlinale youth programme Generation 14plus Short Film Competition, Now. Here, as well as the Lithuanian animated documentary short Purga about the deportations of Lithuanians by the Soviet authorities – winner of the 2023 Lithuanian National Silver Crane Film Award for best animated film. Drijf, a two-dimensional survival satire of a man and a woman, won the Jury Prize at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. 

The post-cinema work The Ghost from Mariupol, which uses virtual reality photographs to find out who owns a mysterious bicycle seen on Google street view, has also been selected for the competition, while the short film The Case of N.N. uses clever variations of camera alienation. 

The competition will be judged by an international jury that includes Ivana Kvesić, director of the Fantoche International Animation Film Festival in Switzerland, Romanna Lobach, actress and internationally renowned producer and founder and director of the production company Akran, as well as Vladan Petković, Serbian film critic, curator and experienced festival consultant, who regularly contributes to Cineuropa. The films in the Short Film International Competition are competing not only for one of the festival’s awards and prizes, but also for a nomination to be selected for the prestigious European Short Film Award 2024 from the European Film Academy.

To learn more information about the programme, visit the festival website rigaiff.lv/sfic.

RIGA IFF’s main partner is the media and technology company Tet. The festival is supported by the State Culture Capital Foundation, the EU programme Creative Europe MEDIA, Riga City Council, and the National Film Centre.