22/08/2017 - The 8th edition of the project will take 28 young cinephiles to Venice, where they will join Samira Makhmalbaf to assign the Giornate degli Autori Award

Promoted by the Giornate degli Autori, the European Parliament LUX Film Prize and Europa Cinemas, with the collaboration of Cineuropa, the 8th edition of the project 28 Times Cinema will see twenty-eight young Europeans smack in the middle of all the excitement at the Giornate during the 74th Venice Film Festival.

15 young women and 13 young men, with ages ranging from 18 to 25, will spend two weeks together in a programme packed with meetings, debates, and, naturally, screenings. The lucky 28 have been selected by the theatres in the Europa Cinemas network from their pool of local filmgoers. At Venice, in fact, each of them will be representing a movie theatre, one for each European Union country.

The participants are Marietta Trendl (Austria), Aline Remes (Belgium), Philippe Morozov (Bulgaria), Marta Ban (Croatia), Nafsika Hadjichristou (Cyprus), Daniela Kadlečková (Czech Republic), Jacob Freudendal-Pedersen (Denmark), Diana Põdra (Estonia), Ronja Tammenpää (Finland), Nicolas Raffin (France), Niklas Pollmann (Germany), Konstantinos Kardakaris (Greece), Sofija Sztepanov (Hungary), Penny McGovern (Ireland), Tommaso Santambrogio (Italy), Vanesa Strautniece (Latvia), Joné Juchnevičiūtė (Lithuania), Lukas Grevis (Luxembourg), Susannah Farrugia (Malta), Esmee van Loon (Netherlands), Jakub Wanat (Poland), Gonçalo Viana (Portugal), Claudia Sirbulescu (Romania), Jakub Sladek (Slovakia), Karla Pelko (Slovenia), Jesús Silva (Spain), Tintin Scheynius (Sweden), and Douglas Greenwood (UK).

Since 2014, the members of the 28 Times Cinema team have been assigning the Giornate degli Autori Award, forming one of the largest and most unusual juries on the international film festival scene. This year, for the first time, a woman will be presiding over the 28 Times Cinema jury: Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf (read news).

As has been the custom since the first edition of the award, Karel Och, artistic director of the Karlovy Vary Festival, member of the selection committee for the LUX Prize and also jury member for Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2017 (read our interview with him), will have the task of introducing each film that comes up for discussion, placing it in the context of the filmmaker's career and specific style. The last of the jury's deliberations for the final vote will take place at the Villa degli Autori on 8 September, livestreamed and also open to the public.

The end of the festival, however, is hardly the end of the 28 Times Cinema team's adventure; starting in October they will become ambassadors for the LUX Prize during the LUX Film Days, which will screen the LUX Prize finalists (news) all across Europe.