11/03/2015 - From 21 to 28 March the Fribourg International Film Festival (FIFF) will spoil its audience with 150 films (113 premières) from as many as 57 different countries

Life May Be by Mark Cousins and Mania Akbari

For his fourth year Thierry Jobin, director of the Fribourg International Film Festival (FIFF), and his team have decided to take us on a journey about freedom. In addition to the two international competitions (features and shorts) this year's edition, with its programme just unveiled, will be enriched by a large group of sidebars that deal with the concept of freedom from various angles: using humour (Decryption: Can you laugh about anything?), eroticism (Genre Cinema: Terra Erotica I) and even from the point of view of peoples whose identity is threatened (Terra Incognita: Indigenous North American cinema). 

The FIFF (from 21 to 28 March) highlights once again, with the independence that sets it apart, a series of films that vary widely in terms of their central theme and structure. Thus in the international competition we have: Feature-length films, both fiction films and documentaries produced independently or with larger budgets. Among the 12 films present this year (from  14 countries) we find: Life May Be [+see also:
trailer
film profile], a poetic exchange of letters between British director and historian Mark Cousins and controversial Iranian actress and director Mania Akbari, Corn Island [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: George Ovashvili
film profile] by Georgian director George Ovashvili, selected to represent Georgia at the Oscars, and also Sand Dollars by director couple Israel Cárdenas (Mexico) and Laura Amelia Guzmán (Dominican Republic) lit up by Géraldine Chaplin's performance. 

As members of the jury (feature films) this year we find four directors who share a remarkable sensitivity for the theme of marginality: Alanis Obomsawin, a pioneer of North American indigenous cinema, French director Alix Delaporte (whose movie Le Dernier Coup de marteau [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], awarded twice in Venice, will have its Swiss premiere at the TIFF), Swiss Ursula Meier and Australian Rolf de Heer. The event will be topped off by three long-awaited Master classes. The first to take the plunge will be Jean-Marc Barr, present with three films in the Genre Cinema section: Terra Erotica I, followed by French long-time actor Jean-François Stévenin and by Syrian director and screenwriter Ossama Mohammed.

(Translated from Italian)