About the selection process:
The Curation
Since its inauguration, in 2021, the International Ecoperformance Film Festival has been curated by members of Taanteatro Companhia, the project organizer. The curators of current edition are Maura Baiocchi, the artistic director of the festival, and Mônica Bernardes, the executive producer. The films in the program need to reflect the conceptual focus of the festival, that is, to address productive tensions between the environment, body, ancestry, and memory. We encourage works that avoid overly anthropocentric dramaturgies and reveal the performativity of the environment.
We began the festival by inaugurating the new genre of 'ecoet[h]ics' that emphasizes the intertwining of the aesthetic and the ethical in artistic production and highlights ancestry in its projective aspect. "What ancestor do I want to be to my descendants?" has been a key question since we coined the concept of ecoperformance around 2009. For the fourth edition, due to numerous entries from other cinematographic genres, we created three new categories: eco-dramas, eco-animations, and , eco-documentaries.
The curatorial process is thought-provoking and exhaustive. The huge number of registrations made us bring the deadline forward by a month. Still, we received around 770 applications from 81 countries. For the final selection, criteria like thematic relevance, performative intensity and form, cinematographic realizations, sound design, and the diversity of the works weigh heavily.
The Jury
Since 2022, the festival has an international jury. In the current edition, this jury is made up of actor and director Nabil Chahhed, from Tunisia, Candelaria Silvestro, painter and performer from Argentina, Rolf Gerstlauer, Swiss architect and filmmaker, Alina Tofan, Romanian performer and actress, and the Mozambican dancer and actor Jorge Ndlozy. The festival awards two prizes, the Best Ecoperformance, chosen by the jury, and the Environmental Dance Prize, worth 5000 Euros, sponsored and chosen by Company Christoph Winkler based in Berlin.
The films
Approaches to the environment-body-ancestry-memory complex vary greatly. The anthropos narrative still prevails, that is, the tendency toward a dominiation of the scene by a human protagonist; often to the detriment of the environmental performativity as a whole. We prefer works striving for a SymbioScene, that is, a scene in which the human figure ceases to protagonize in favor of the interaction between all performative elements and agents of an environment on the same plane of importance. That is no easy task, but we experience a growth in understanding about the festival's thematic focus.
Diversity
Diversity is inherent to nature and, therefore, to the festival’s ecopolitical mission. This affirmation of life forms is attractive to free spirits and minority populations. Consequently, the festival resonates with audiovisual creators and audiences open to encounters with different geographies, ethnicities, cultures, languages, bodies, ages, and genders. We are invested in the natural and cultural plurality essential to the conditions of life and, therefore, to all living beings on our planet. As we diversify the programming, we notice thematic convergences approached from different perspectives: scarcity, pollution and destruction of natural resources, extinction of territories, populations, ways of life and languages. This year, by adopting the FilmFreeway platform, the festival expanded its geographic reach, especially to the regions of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Other factors that contributed to the festival’s diversity are related to the format. We started in 2021, during the pandemic, as an online festival accessible worldwide. The following year, in partnership with Cine Satyros Bijou, the festival became part of the São Paulo cultural calendar. Now, in its fourth edition, the project expands the face-to-face format internationally, in collaboration with universities, cultural centers, and theaters in Argentina, the United States, Australia, Romania, and Germany.