26/06/2023 - The Lithuanian gathering has announced that at least 50% of the final programme will be made up of films helmed by women

The closing ceremony of Scanorama's 2022 edition

Lithuania’s second-largest festival, the European Film Forum Scanorama, has launched an open call for its European feature-film competition. The festival has also announced that at least 50% of the final feature-film competition programme will consist of movies directed by women.

To be eligible, applying production companies must be based in Europe. Up to ten features will be selected for the competition. The directors and crew members of the films in competition will be provided with an opportunity to present their works to Lithuanian audiences in person and take part in a dedicated programme of industry events. Fiction, documentary, animation and experimental titles are accepted for the festival’s second-ever feature-film competition, and can be submitted until 1 September.

“Cinema shapes our collective imagination: it participates in the construction of society while at the same time reflecting it. Supporting artists who push the boundaries of cinema as a form of artistic expression, we are nonetheless experiencing the loss of eloquent, young female voices. While looking at the careers of the winners of our short-film competition, which is now 14 years old, we have noticed that most of the women directed their first feature no earlier than five years after graduating from film school. What’s more, some of them completely vanished from the film world. Although career paths can vary individually, making a directorial feature debut usually took a couple of years for their male colleagues,” said Grazina Arlickaite, Scanorama’s founder and artistic director.

Furthermore, Scanorama has established a €7,000 Award for Best Film in the Competition Programme, which will be chosen by an international jury.

In 2022, Mitra Farahani’s See You Friday, Robinson [+see also:
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Last year’s jury was made up of five European Film Academy members. The jurors were former director and producer of the European Film Awards and member of the board of directors of the Wim Wenders Foundation Marion Döring, film director and producer Sergej Stanojkovski, writer-director Ibolya Fekete, film programmer and delegate for the San Sebastián International Film Festival Annina Wettstein, and Fabienne Moris, programme coordinator and member of the Doc Station workshop selection committee at the Berlinale.

The 21st edition of the European Film Forum Scanorama will be held in Vilnius, Kaunas, Klaipėda and Šiauliai from 9-19 November.