The Clermont-Ferrand international short film festival, the largest event of its kind in the world, opens Friday with a focus on women, in a 46th edition impacted by financial constraints. This new event offers more than 500 screenings spread across different programs until February 10.
Behind the lens or in front of the camera, women will be at the heart of the event, including a retrospective entitled Insoumises – Portraits of indocile women, bringing together films from 12 countries, from 1971 to 2021.
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Unlike other years, it is not a country that the festival will put in the spotlight but a continent, Europe, and more particularly 24 European directors, like the Swiss Corina Schwingruber Ilic, who torpedo the consumerist faults of society in All Inclusive. “Women will therefore be present everywhere: in films, at the heart of discussions, professional meetings or conferences offered to the public, and finally on stage,” underline the organizers.
Fiction, animation, comedies, thrillers: the three competitions, national, international and Lab, will offer 133 short films, chosen from 9,400 registered films. Eleven women members of the jury, directors, journalists, screenwriters, will be responsible for deciding the winners. For the third year, the prize for best Queer film will be awarded to a film from one of the three competitions which, beyond LGBT themes, “will present an opening onto a world resistant to norms”, according to the organizers. .
But for the first time in its history, the festival was forced to reduce the number of programs in its competitions. Thus, the national selection will go from 12 to 10 programs, and the international, from 14 to 12. The price of tickets also had to be slightly increased. “It is indeed the three difficult years that we have just gone through that have forced us to make these decisions,” declared President Éric Roux.
The 2021 edition had to take place online and the next one was disrupted by health measures. The subsidy from the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region to the festival was also halved in the spring, from 200,000 to 100,000 euros, out of an overall budget of 3.2 million euros. The short film market, a meeting place for the short format industry, will take place from Monday February 5 to Friday February 8.
