NORIENT FILM FESTIVAL Bern/Lausanne (Switzerland)
THE WORLD THROUGH MUSIC AND SOUND
The NFF explores the contemporary world through music and sound. We search films that portray musicians, music, sound or noise as seismographs of our time, and speak of the possibilities and challenges of the Now. We screen documentaries mainly, but are open to feature films, short movies, video art, and experimental formats. Our goal is to nominate films that are getting close to people and phenomena. Films screened at the NFF have won important awards or were nominated at major international A festivals, some have been produced very DIY and low budget. We are especially interested in films by filmmakers from outside of Europe and the US.
The NFF is run by the team of Norient and the Norient Space «The Now In Sound» (www.norient.com). Norient was founded 2002. It is a platform/magazine/network for the sound of the world: for contemporary music, quality journalism, cutting-edge research, and multimedia projects.
The NORIENT FILM FESTIVAL is its local window in the very special cinema Kino Reitschule in Bern, Switzerland. The festivals brings together filmmakers from all over the world, a truly dedicated audience, and fascinating films during one long weekend in mid January. The festival regularly expands to other cinemas and cities in Switzerland and beyond, such as Lausanne and St. Gallen.
We take pride in our film program and make a big effort to find strong films. We spend a lot of time viewing all the entries, and we finally official nominate a handful of very strong films. The official nomination is our award. For the moment we decided not to introduce an audience award.
We do not offer prizes, but we invite some of the filmmakers to our festival, or we offer screening fees.
We further publish background articles about the nominated films on the well visited NORIENT SPACE «The Now In Sound».