ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL BARCELONA 2019
From October 30th to November 10th

The Barcelona Asian Film Festival is back! This year we hold our 7th edition with more than a hun-dred films from 25 countries of the Asian continent. And once again, Cinemes Girona, CaixaForum and Filmoteca de Catalunya are the main venues of the Asian Film Festival Barcelona (AFFBCN) that will be held between October 30th and November 10th. Also, as a novelty, this year AFFBCN moves its programme forward with OFF Festival that starts on October 4th.

The festival proposes several cinematographic tours through the following sections: Official, Offi-cial Panorama, Discoveries, Netpac and Special, all for competition. For the second consecutive time, the festival hosts a selection of the 2018 Asian Film Awards, which is annually granted by the Asian Film Awards Academy with headquarters in Hong Kong; and finally the Retrospective Section, organised by the Japan Foundation and Filmoteca de Catalunya, which will be devoted to the Japanese film director Yasujirō Ozu.

Most of the more than 100 long films were made between 2018 and 2019, and we add 25 short films and 18 films of the Retrospective section. It consists of a festival where auteur cinema and drama genre prevail.

This year the festival joins OFF Festival with a monographic series of Iranian cinema which will be screened at CaixaForum between the 4th and the 31st of October, even though these films will also be part of the different competition sections of the festival. OFF Festival also includes the se-lection of short films that will be programmed in CaixaForum’s Aula Zero, as well as 6 documenta-ries at B the Travel Brand Xperience and 4 long films at Cinemes Girona.

Most of the films of AFFBCN 2019 will be screened between October 30th and November 10th at Cinemes Girona. The film “Ayka” (2018) by the Kazakh director Sergei Dvortsevoy will raise the curtain with a special session on the 30th of October, whereas the official opening will be with “Still Human” (2018) by Oliver Chan. Both films will be screened at Cinemes Girona.

AFFBCN includes 4 international juries and a youth jury made up of Asian young people who live in Barcelona, students of Barcelona film schools and young film directors.

Casa Asia continues once again with its commitment for Barcelona to have a festival that compiles the best films from the Asian continent and that makes access to productions of that part of the world easier, as well as to promote a meeting point for professionals of the sector and of the film industry.

Hashtag: #AFFBCN

Essay by the Asian Film Festival Barcelona Director