LABORATORY/FACTORY/AMUSEMENT PARK OF THE EYES AND THE EARS

“Factory of the eye and the ear, laboratory of the eye and the ear, amusement park of the eye and the ear” – this is how Fernando Birri described the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (EICTV) in San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, on the occasion of its founding in 1986. From the outset, this film school saw itself as an alternative to Eurocentric visual regimes and rapidly developed a wide-reaching international network. This network is at the heart of this year’s retrospective – and the IFFI is also part of it: co-founder and long-standing director Fernando Birri was a guest at the IFFI on several occasions. Numerous works by EICTV graduates have been featured at the festival. The focus of IFFI #35 is on the director Lemohang Mosese from Lesotho – one of the most striking voices in contemporary cinema. In his films, cinema unfolds as a sensory experience of seeing and hearing and as a poetic meditation on exile and memory, on colonial legacies and spiritual continuities. Today, 40 years after Birri’s programmatic formula, the question arises anew: what can cinema be today – in a present marked by crises, upheavals and media overload? The diversity of cinematic voices and forms at IFFI #35 opens up a space for shared reflection on this very question.