Increasingly focused on the digital world, the immense opportunities it brings and its versatility, the Geneva International Film Festival (GIFF) has quite naturally recognised the new Digital Creation Hub (Pôle de création numérique) directed by Emmanuel Cuénod - the festival’s artistic director between 2013 and 2020 - as its ally.

From this year onwards, the alliance will closely collaborate in the organisation of the Swiss Interactive Sessions (running 6-10 November 2023), an initiative of the Geneva Digital Market (GDM) which is dedicated to Swiss digital artists. It provides the latter with an opportunity to increase their international visibility, allowing them to present their projects, at various stages in their production, to representatives of institutions and art centres. Last year, the Swiss Interactive Sessions introduced a group of renowned curators and programmers to ten interactive projects by Swiss artists working as much within the domains of plastic and visual arts as media design or performing arts. The ten artists were able to present their projects via video before benefitting from several networking sessions and a final round table, where they were actually able to meet the people they’d been dealing with.

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GIFF’s current Head of Professional and Digital Programmes Paola Gazzani Marinelli, who’s set to join the new Institution as Programme Supervisor and Chair of the Programming Committee, will serve as a link between the Digital Creation Hub and the Genevan festival. Marinelli will also continue to collaborate with the GIFF, becoming part of the Digital Selection Committee. As stressed by the GIFF and GDM’s current director Anaïs Emery, this partnership "could add real value to this gathering". For his part, Cuénod thanked the GIFF on behalf of the Digital Creation Hub "for this opportunity, and we’re delighted by the message of unity and resource-pooling which is sent by this first collaboration effort".

The main objective of the new Genevan Hub, which is shared by the festival, is to increase the support given to Swiss digital content creators (of the French-speaking variety, in particular) whose talent is sometimes better harnessed outside of Switzerland. The aim of enhancing relationships with the various supporting bodies - of which the partnership with the GIFF is a concrete example - is to develop new stories with the capability of winning over ever-widening audiences. With its various initiatives and programmes, the new Digital Creation Hub seeks to stimulate the creativity of artists working with digital technology, to lend visibility, and to promote the abundance of French-language Swiss creation.