* Zurich Film Festival 2018 *

First held in 2005, Zurich Film Festival established itself very quickly on national and international film festival scene. The formula for it success it's probably mix of an attractive location: international but small city of Zurich; great selection of movies and different programs/events like ZFF Masters, ZFF Talks, Zurich Summit and few more.

Last year I read the sentence in an industry booklet I received with my accreditation and this stayed with me as a logical reason behind Zurich Film Festival's success. Basically, the organizers agree on few basics for a successful film festival: "content is a king, collaboration is key and encounters among creative folks are essential". It is obvious that they are taking "these basics" seriously every year while they are developing festival further and most importantly, in the right direction.

The 14th edition of Zurich Film Festival passed the mark of 100'000 visitors (last year 98'300) while playing 162 movies from 48 countries and no less than 42 debut works. Like last year I had to heavily prioritize and choose wisely which movies I will see. Luckily Zurich is a small town so it was not a big deal to run from one location to other, but because of my limited time I had to skip all the events and side happenings and focus only on the movies. And as Gimme A Beat is focused on female related subjects, through my review of the Zurich Film Festival I explored *female factor* of the festival and therefore focused on two type of movies: movies made by female filmmakers and movies showing female life. The organizers used hashtags to mark the movies so finding the movies that I potentially liked and that fit my exploration was easy, I just followed #FemaleFilmmakers and #FemaleLife hashtags. I also used them in my reviews. And even though I saw tiny piece of the whole festival I was truly impressed with movie selection, great balance of different genres, aspiring filmmakers and (potential) blockbusters as well as strong women presence. In addition, the organization was impeccable, especially media center that was always available and ready to take care of press needs.

Movies selection wise I've seen many movies and posted review of them on Gimme A Beat page. Just follow the search with hashtags #zff #zff2018 #gimmeabeat. 

In tonight's Gimme A Beat I will try to cover most of those movies again and in more details, or at least my favorite ones. I will be also focusing on Firecrackers, an outstanding feature debut from Jasmin Mozaffari ... and one of my highlights of Zurich Film Festival.

Before seeing the movie I had a pleasure to meet and interview this talented director. Jasmin told me that there is a bit of her and her experiences (or women close to her) incorporated in both characters, therefore making them both real and relatable to women out there. She also shared with me that Firecrackers is about patriarchal oppression in today's world and women (as well as men) trying to break free. We also talked about Jasmin's vision of female freedom, her plans for future and excellent program of Zurich Film Festival packed with great selection of movies from female filmmakers.

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You can read my review of the movie here. To hear the interview with Jasmin, my impressions of Zurich Film Festival and more about Firecrackers and other movies I've seen, tune to Gimme A Beat (17.12.2018) tonight for ..

Zurich Film Festival 2018

* playlist to be added *

from 22:00 - 00:00 on:
webradio lora

featuring:
gimme a beat reviews movies at ZFF 2018

Kisses, Babymonster
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for the info about old shows please go to previous entries

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