International Portrait Film Festival
Sofia, Bulgaria
IPFF is on the path towards its fifth edition! Once again, we will celebrate short portrait cinema and art which explores, educates, and transforms.
PHILOSOPHY
A portrait is an image heavy with meaning. Layered and multifaceted, it has a visual, psychological, material, emotional and spiritual dimension. It can be political, conceptual, poetic. Or something else.
A portrait always undergoes a transformation. It imitates and repeats life, but becomes something or someone new along the way. It changes its original subject while capturing it. Then the portrait is transformed again through the mind of every brave interpreter.
A film portrait is a soul in the form of light encountering the canvas of the white screen while pairs of eyes are staring at its vastness. It is a trace. And a reverie. It is past, present, and future intertwined.
FOCUS
The portrait is the focus of the films that will be screened at the IPFF. We are looking for portrait films that have already been completed, as well as such that will be created with the concrete idea of 'portrait'. Of a person. A group of people. An object. Something invisible, but substantial. Of the self.
WELCOME
IPFF welcomes a wide range of films and filmmakers: students, professionals, from low budget to big-scale productions, alternative and independent films by individuals and by collectives or institutions.
AIM
IPFF aspires to bring together artists and viewers who sincerely long for enrichment with art, intellectual discussion, and an experience of cinema through a new prism - that of the portrait film.
CHARACTER
IPFF is a hybrid event. A symbiosis of intriguing live encounters and memorable virtual experiences. An interweaving of portrait cinema from around the world with debates, lectures, workshops.
DREAM
We dream and imagine that the IPFF is for those who profoundly need art and excitement. And for the ones who believe in cinema’s power to change us for the better. For the unafraid to search within the screen even when it offers a strange and experimental viewpoint, or difficult questions about human rights, war and the ecological crises of our shared present.