09/03/2005

Celebrating this year its 35th birthday, the Tampere International short Film Festival is opening its doors today (9-13 March) to over a hundred screenings of short films from around the world as well as seminars, exhibitions, concerts and unique opportunities for audiences to meet with directors and film professionals.
Known as ‘the largest and longest-running short film festival in Northern Europe’, Tampere will focus this year on British fiction with works from Barry Purves (head animator on Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks and advisor to the animators on Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King) and Simon Ellis, director of short films and music videos. Ellis’ new short film The What will be among the 78 international short films competing at the festival. A competition of Finnish short films will also allow Tampere audiences to sample the latest currents in Finnish short filmmaking.

The international programme will present an extensive selection of fiction and documentary works from Cuba; the ‘Case Records series’ will platform Norwegian works and Polish Academy award winner Zbig Rybczynski (Tango, 1983) will be present to discuss some of his experimental films.
As part of the ‘Animation Alive and Well’ section, animated feature films from the Estonian Nukufilm production company will be shown as well as works from Turku Polytechnic School.

With over 27,500 attendances last year, Tampere has become a major cultural event in Northern Europe, and to take advantage of the many international guests and film professionals in attendance, the Finnish Film & Audiovisual Export group (Favex) in cooperation with the Association of Independent producers of Finland and the Central organization of Finnish film producers have decided to create this year the first Finnish film market parallel to the festival. 20 Finnish production companies (including Artista Film, Blind Spot Pictures, MRP Matila Röhr Films, and Solar Films Inc) will present some of the latest Finnish feature films and TV drama productions at the two-days market from March 9-11.