The LICHTER Film Festival is now in its eleventh edition. And the festival team has again managed with a lot of commitment and creativity to put together a great program with interesting films, but also an educational, entertaining and above all innovative framework. In addition to the international programme on the annual theme of "Chaos" and current highlights of regional filmmaking, which was the original impetus for the vigorously growing festival, there will also be the congress "Future of German Film" with an accompanying film series. A video art exhibition and discussion rounds on the annual theme are also part of the festival, as are two very special cinema experiences: LICHTER dives into virtual reality again after last year's success and sets up the world's first bumper car cinema.
From 03 to 08 April 2018, the Zoo-Gesellschaftshaus will be transformed into the "Zoo-Lichtspiele". Back in the 1920s, the new LICHTER festival centre was christened with this name, and 30 years later, long-time zoo director and Oscar®-winning animal filmmaker Bernhard Grzimek continued this cinema tradition. The 11th LICHTER Filmfest Frankfurt International will now revive the venue. Over 100 films and events await festival-goers in the swanky building and other cinemas in Frankfurt and Offenbach for six days.
International Film Program
The opening film Home tells of generational conflicts, violence and abuse. The coming-of-age drama earned Fien Troch the Orizzonti Award for best director at the Venice Film Festival. "In the films, very different people steer into chaos - pubescent teenagers, a cosmonaut in the Mir space station and Iggy Pop, who gives voice to the meaning-seeking nothingness," explains Johanna Süß, deputy festival director. With All You Can Eat Buddha, Women of the Venezuelan Chaos, The Goose, Dhogs, Sergio & Sergei and In Praise Of Nothing, six films are screening as German premieres in the competition for the LICHTER International Feature Award. Directing greats Lav Diaz (Season of the Devil) and Sergei Loznitsa (A Gentle Creature) are showing their latest works as is Lynne Ramsay, who won the Best Screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival for her film A Beautiful Day. Lead actor Joaquin Phoenix won Best Actor.
The World's First Bumper Car Cinema
The choice of theme also spurred the festival team's penchant for creative and unusual acts. With the Light Rider - the world's first bumper car cinema - LICHTER is bringing plenty of wild mayhem to the Naxoshalle. The initial spark for the project came from Süß: "You have to think of this insane fusion as an experimental spatial installation." The 200-square-meter roadway will be transformed into an interactive cinematic experience through augmented reality technology. "Our project partner Node - Forum for Digital Arts projects visuals onto the track, which can then be moved by the cars," Süß said. 3D cameras capture the entire bumper car, allowing the blending of real and virtual levels of perception. To finance the bumper car cinema, LICHTER participated in the crowdfunding initiative kulturMut. 174 fans supported the project with 3894 euros. The Aventis Foundation and the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain rounded up the donation sum to 20,000 euros.
Thematic Accompanying Programme
In cooperation with the Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders", LICHTER takes a discursive look at the annual theme "Chaos" in the thematic accompanying programme. In interdisciplinary discussions, philosophers, artists and scientists ask themselves whether the world order is coming apart at the seams in the face of anti-liberal developments, what mischief the Internet can cause, and to what extent chaotic conditions also support productive change.
Congress and film series "Future German Film"
After Edgar Reitz, as patron of the LICHTER Filmfest 2016, advocated a new beginning in film politics, the festival organizers worked for over two years on the congress Future German Film. On 05 and 06 April at the Zoo-Gesellschaftshaus, LICHTER will join numerous filmmakers to shed light on the topics of financing, training conditions and the future potential of cinema culture and film distribution.
At the same time, the festival will showcase the current highlights of the German film landscape in a separate programme section. "The film series proves once again that it is not only international enfant terribles like Christian Petzold who keep finding new ways of telling stories. The cinematic visions of Germany's up-and-coming directors are currently so wide-ranging that it is a real pleasure to observe their development," says festival director Gregor Maria Schubert. In addition to this year's Berlinale highlights In den Gängen (director: Thomas Stuber) and Transit (director: Christian Petzold), the section also features debut works such as Whatever Happens Next (director: Julian Pörksen) and Freddy/Eddy (director: Tini Tüllmann). "That young German film lacks visibility in the cinema is not a new phenomenon, mind you. Because they couldn't find a distributor in the 1960s, Edgar Reitz and Ula Stöckl simply grabbed a projector and showed their films in pubs," says Süß. At LICHTER, there will be a reprise of this pub cinema. In Frankfurt's Mal Seh´n Kino, the audience can choose from 22 episodes of the short film series Geschichten vom Kübelkind in the presence of Reitz á la carte.
LICHTER goes Virtual Reality
For the second time, LICHTER is hosting the VR Storytelling Competition. A jury of experts has selected five 360-degree films from over 70 submissions. The finalists come from Russia, Kananda, USA, Taiwan and France. After the great audience success at last year's premiere, it quickly became clear to the festival organizers to establish the VR section as a permanent LICHTER component. "The exciting question with this year's finalists is definitely how this new form of storytelling has evolved over the course of a year," says festival director Gregor Maria Schubert. Using VR goggles, viewers will travel across the fascinating landscape on Siberia's Lake Baikal, peer into the brain of a science fiction author or relive the traumatising experiences of a US soldier in the Iraq war. The winner of the competition will be announced at the awards ceremony on 05 April at 18:30. In addition, the festival will host the LICHTER VR Lab conference on trends and challenges in the fledgling VR/AR scene.
The regional film program
Founded eleven years ago as a platform for regional filmmaking, LICHTER continues to bring the diversity of Hessen's filmmaking to the screen in its anniversary edition. "The submissions for the White Bembel competition have shown how strong the 2018 film year is," says Schubert. The productions were all made with the participation of filmmakers and sponsors from Hesse and the Rhine-Main region. No less than six feature-length films will celebrate their world premiere at LICHTER, including Rosa von Praunheim's new film Männerfreundschaften. Winner of the 2017 Hessian Film Award for best documentary, Wunder der Wirklichkeit looks back at the Rüsselsheim-based artist group Cinema Concetta led by Martin Kirchberger. Ink of Yam was honored as the best Hessian university film. Tom Fröhlich's graduation film at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences is set in a tattoo studio in Jerusalem, where the Middle East conflict is seemingly non-existent. David Sieveking's new film Eingeimpft (Vaccinated) takes up a topic that is heating up tempers in Germany: vaccination.
Also competing for the White Bembel are 24 regional short films. This year's international short film programme will also revolve around the annual theme of "chaos".
The LICHTER Art Award
For the 8th edition of the LICHTER Art Award, over 90 works were submitted from all over the world - from Collingwood to Hamburg. The selected contemporary film and video art ranges from animation to film essays to fictional narratives. The works reveal the immateriality of the Internet as well as the hyperreal post-Internet aesthetic. At the same time, they formulate an independent commentary on social reality and current social phenomena of our time. The works of the five finalists Nikita Diakur (Ugly), Jakob Engel (Waiting for Record), Martin Kohout (Slides), Ingel Vaikla (Roosenberg), Gerald Zahn (Die Galerie/The Gallery) will be shown by LICHTER in a curated exhibition in the foyer of the Zoo-Gesellschaftshaus.
Venues
In the new festival centre there are two cinema halls, where also the congress "Zukunft Deutscher Film" takes place. The Naxoshalle hosts film programming, the LICHTER VR Lab, the VR Storytelling Competition awards ceremony and the Autoscooterkino. LICHTER remains faithful to the Mal Seh´n Kino and the Deutsches Filmmuseum. Further festival cinemas are for the first time the Harmonie and the filmklubb in Offenbach.
Detailed information on the individual program points and tickets can be found HERE: <link https: lichter-filmfest.de programm filmprogramm-2018 _blank>
