Fribourg 2007

The Fribourg Film Festival Center

After fifteen years as artistic director of the Fribourg International Film festival, Martial Knaebel decided that this year's festival was his farewell festival. In its 21st edition the festival offered auteuer films and films from Africa, Asian and South America along with a retrospective of Taiwanese cinema.
The FIPRESCI Prize was given to the Belgian-French film The Drowned Man (Le cercle des noyés) by Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd. Our jury was impressed by the masterfully balanced use of film as a form of art and a vehicle for memory and political awareness and by its beautiful and sober proposal of how to represent the tortured and the disappeared body through the image
Fribourg International Film Festival, March 18-25
Festival's official website: www.fiff.ch
Details of the FIPRESCI Prize

Reports:

Absence as Permanent Presence. Through hypnotic images that reveal more by being inexplicit, Pamela Biénzobas Saffie gains insight into the inhumane treatment of black activists in Mauritania in The Drowned Men by Pierre-Yves Vandeweerd.
The Emergence of the Word. Hassen Euchi is impressed by Fadhel Jaibi's Junun (Demencia), a provocative, poetic and powerful study of schizophrenia in a repressive society.
An Iranian Working Woman. Pradip Biswas follows the eloquent silent journey of a working woman in Teheran in Niki Karimi's A Few Years Later (Chand Rooz Ba 'D) which moves from the particular to represent the plight of most women in Iran.
One Way Road Blues. Sergey Anashkin goes on three trips, in China (How Is Your Fish Today? by Guo Xiaolu), in Argentina (The Other by Ariel Rotter) and Algeria (Rome rather Than You by Tariq Teguia), seeing each as a metaphor for our lives. 

The Fribourg FIPRESCI Jury (from the left): Pradip Biswas, Hassen Euchi, Pamela Bienzobas Saffie, Sergey Anashkin.

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