INTERFILM 40 International Short Film Festival Berlin
5 - 10 November 2024

Focus On Embodiment

We focus our attention on bodies, the politics of bodies, embodiment and the body in film, and explore corporeality and its relationship to the camera. Which bodies appear in which (filmic) spaces, and how? How are contemporary strands of social discourse reflected in bodies, particularly in the ways they are represented?

Questions of representation are invariably questions of perspective too: What new modes of "showing" are filmmakers developing to counter traditional representations of and narratives about marginalised and racialised bodies, and how do these operate as both political act and discourse?

In this connection, we consider it important to emphasise that the selected films are not capable of covering the full diversity of all bodies. For too long, a certain universal validity was ascribed to individual films, or they even staked out such a claim for themselves.

However, our programs do contain concrete excerpts from lived realities. For that is precisely what these bodies are: lived realities. They are not tags, not labels, not issues. Still, when our bodies become political bodies, the private becomes the public. We seek to shed light on processes of liberation from both external projections and internal struggles with our own bodies. Because short film remains militant, progressive and a means of individual expression!