European Film Festival kicks off anniversary edition, reaches 13 cities in Romania

The 30th edition of the European Film Festival, the event showcasing the diversity of European cinema, runs this year a program of more than 50 films questioning the limits of cinema and the freedoms allowed to filmmakers.

“Limits come in many forms, and only some of them are helpful to us. In the best-case scenario, limits stimulate creativity. But how does that square with the fact that we always hear that creativity knows no bounds? Where do the freedoms a filmmaker can allow themselves begin and end? From the inherently political relationship with the world in front of the screen, to the length of a shot, the sharpness of a line, or the gaze cast perpendicularly across the shapes of a body—everything can be censored in one way or another. If it has limits, then more often than not, cinema ceases to be cinema at all. Hybrid films that no one has timed with a stopwatch, comedies woven solely through editing, scripts without acts, dramas without culprits, epics without heroes. After 30 years, the film as we see it at the festival and the world it reflects have something in common: both are boundless,” Cătălin Olaru, the artistic director of this year’s edition, explained.