Baff

It doesn’t mean anything and besides some people hate anniversaries with round numbers. Perhaps any anniversary is a complete nonsense, leaving us absorbed in drawing up a balance sheet of the past and counting our grey hairs in the lift mirror. But ten years of a film festival are merely raw inexperience compared to other festivals in the world that have half a century of history behind them. For us it has been a road on which we have accumulated not just grey hairs, but also joys, heartaches, disappointments, highs, sorrows, binges, but above all has allowed us to witness, from a grandstand seat, the genesis of a whole generation of new Asian directors who have made us see that the questions they ask themselves about how to make films or what stories to tell are not so different from ours.

Even so, the challenge that has been facing us for some time now is to mark a clear difference in our official section, plumping for artistic commitment, stylistic radicality, giving a chance to new talents, examining new trends, in short, showing the cinema we think counts right now. A section in which, of necessity, the BAFF paints its own picture of itself as a festival and which it wants to be its flagship. In spite of living in the age of the global village, with people theorising about transnational cinema, and the reality of having a country’s entire output just a click away, we still look on cinema from the East as a wager for the future and a breath of fresh air among the list of movies showing in the cinemas, which unfortunately almost turns into a wasteland for the rest of the year. To consolidate the BAFF’s commitment to new Asian cinema, the prizes in this section have been doubled, which in the end comes down to the same thing: an effort to give visibility to certain particular cinematographies and back new directors. From now on there will be two awards: the Golden Durian for emerging directors, those who have made less than three films and are the ones who must –of necessity- renew the contemporary authoral corpus; and the Cinematk prize, which includes a commitment to screening the winning film in the cinemas of this country. We hope that our efforts will help to place a new star on the horizon.