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Europe in Shorts:
Classic Documentaries
From its
creation, a key objective of the European Coordination of Film Festivals
has been to develop and strengthen cooperation between its members. And
one of the more successful types of collaboration has been the organisation
of touring film programmes which are available free to all member festivals.
For instance, the first four editions of Europe in Shorts, a series of
short film packages established in 1996, have toured over 60 festivals
in at least 11 countries of the European Union.
With Classic
Documentaries, the fifth in the series, participating festivals have decided
to highlight an aspect of cinema, which had not been considered in previous
editions of Europe in Shorts: the European film heritage. Most films in
the third and fourth packages, The Sound of Shorts and Films for Children
were fairly recent. Moreover they were all fiction or animation. It seemed
therefore appropriate to focus on the documentary, at a time when several
projects con-cer-ning the promotion and circulation of this film genre
are being discussed within the Coordination.
The content
of the programme Classic Documentaries certainly highlights the diversity
of styles within the genre. Not least because of the long period covered
(over 30 years) and the geographical differences (8 countries). There
are also several major figures of the European film history, such as Joris
Ivens, Marcel Carné, Henri Storck, Alain Tanner and Vittorio de Seta.
As usual
with Europe in Shorts, the 20 festivals which participated in the selection,
preferred short films with no or few dialogues, to make the pro-gramme
more accessible to a larger audience across Europe. With the support of
the European Commission, for each film, the non-commercial rights and
two new prints could be acquired. The European Coordination of Film Festivals
is also grateful to the following or-ga-ni-sations for their support in
acquiring prints or rights, or both: Statens Filmcentral (Denmark), British
Film Institute and Commissariat Général aux Relations Internationales
de Belgique.
Coordination
"Europe in Shorts 5 - Documentary Classics":
Miguel Dias, Festival Internacional de Curtas Metragens, Auditório Municipal
- Praça da República, 4480 - 715 Vila do Conde Portugal, Tel. +351-252-248
469 / 252-545 516, Fax. +351-252 248 416
e-mail: festival@curtasmetragens.pt
www.curtasmetragens.pt
European
Coordination of Film Festivals
64 rue Philippe le Bon, Brüssel, Belgien
Tel. +32-2-280 1376, Fax. +32-2-230 9141, e-mail: cefc@skypro.be
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