Festival Data:

• Established: 1999
• Genre: General
• Attendance: 260700
• Media Attendance: 410
• Accredited Industry Attendance: 2202
• Total Number of Films Screened: 468
• Total Screenings: 874
• Total Domestic Films Screened: 97
• Total Foreign Films Screened: 371
• # of Shorts Screened: 130
• # of Features Screened: 338
• Accreditations: FIPRESCI

• Competitive
• Film Market
• Has Panels
• Has Seminars
• Workshops

Festival Website:

Festival Description:

First organized by the Secretary of Culture of the Buenos Aires City Government in 1999, the Buenos Aires Festival International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI) continues to grow its reach and significance. BAFICI is a space that stimulates cultural consumption, promotes the professional formation and summons more young people to join from different perspectives and disciplines to the audiovisual arts, turning Buenos Aires into one of the epicenters of the world young cinema and contributing to define it as the cultural capital of Latin America.

A distinctive feature of the Festival is its programming of independent cinema from all the geographical corners of the world, allowing the audience to get closer to cinemas and realities to which they are not used to having access through the traditional ways of distribution and exhibition. Films from 47 countries contributed to an unequaled multiplicity and plurality of visions and, as a whole, they were a strong sample of cultural diversity, understood as a fundamental axis of the public policy

Filmmakers compete for awards such as:  Best Film, Best Director, Jury Special Award, Best Actor and Best Actress in the Official Competition, Lo nuevo de lo nuevo Competition, Short Films Competition, Human Rights Competition, Audience Award (for Best Local and Foreign Film), Diversidad Cultural Award, Fipresci Award, Signis Award, ADF Award (for Best Photography Direction) and the A.MU.CI Award (for Best Sound Track).

With a goal of stimulating and supporting new independent production, BAFICI created the Buenos Aires Lab, the projects incubator. On the one hand Hubert Bals, Göteborg, Antorchas and TyPA foundations granted three awards of 10.000 euros each for the financing of those projects. On the other hand, the Seminar “Produire au Sud” (made for the first time in Latin America) selected projects that competed for the Young Art Producer Award (5.000 euros). Additionally, the Best Work in Progress was awarded with US $12.000 in postproduction services.

The international acknowledgement of the Argentinean cinema, displayed regularly in the mass media and present in the several awards granted in the last years, is also reflected at BAFICI. The presence of 24 international festival programmers as Venice, Berlin, Montreal, Toronto, Karlovy Vary, Thessaloniki, Bruges, Trieste, San Francisco, Locarno, Pusan, Vancouver, Valdivia, Ghent, Lincoln, Oslo and New Cork enhance the display of the local production.

The Secretary of Culture, Dr. Gustavo López, pointed at the Festival closing: “We think of Buenos Aires as a meeting place for culture. A space for creation, vanguard, search of identities"

Film Submissions:

• Accepts direct submissions
• Submission formats: Beta-SP, Digi-Beta, 16mm, 35mm
• Call for Entry: http:/ / www.bafici.gov.ar/ home/ web/ es/ bafici/ rules.html