PRESS RELEASE
EXPERIMENTAL FORUM
The 49th edition of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival introduces the Experimental Forum, a new pilot program that grants emphasis on experimental film. “Film is still the most inclusive and accessible medium, communicating all the Arts. This new program will venture to open a new window to the avant garde, free from all conventions on the one hand, but examined and presented through the prism of cinema’s history on the other”, stresses Festival Director Despina Mouzaki. The Experimental Forum, programmed by Vassilis Bourikas, includes an Homage to Croatian director Ivan Ladislav Galeta in his presence, as well as a selection of 20 films from the Bela Balazs Studio in Hungary.
HOMAGE TO IVAN LADISLAV GALETA
Ivan Ladislav Galeta is a Croatian multimedia artist, cinematographer and director, who has exhibited his work in events and venues such as the Kunst Akademie in Offenbach, the Millennium Film Center in New York and, more recently, in the Documenta Kassel, the most important exhibition of contemporary art in the world. With a creative activity that spans over forty years and includes photography, installations, sculpture, performance, video art and the written word, Galeta’s films appear to be only a fraction of his legacy.
7 of the artist’s films will be showcased in the 49th Thessaloniki Film Festival, amongst which are Metanoia (1969), his earliest one, Wal(l)zen (1977-1989), the first one to introduce his idea of the musical geometry of editing, as well as his magnum opus, Water Pulu (1973-1987), a conceptual manipulation of footage from a water-polo match.
BBX: HUNGARIAN EXPERIMENTAL FILM AND THE BELA BALAZS STUDIO
In 1959, in the spirit of film theorist Bela Balazs’s pedagogical policies, the homonymous Studio was set up in Budapest in order to support young filmmakers in their experimentation with innovative cinematic styles. Sebestyen Kodolanyi, the Director of the Bela Balazs Studio, -now a prestigious archive- will attend the 49th TIFF and present some of the 20 films from the Studio’s history. Among this selection of films, the most comprehensive compilation of the studio’s experimental work since a 1985 MoMA exhibition, features work by Galeta, Miklos Erdely and a focus on Janos Toth with four shorts. The total of the selection spans 3 decades of filmmaking, from the 1960s to the 1990s.
