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The 14th Prague Short Film Festival presents strong women’s stories from the Amazon, and Portuguese director Gabriel Abrantes

The 14th annual Prague Short Film Festival, organized by the team behind the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, will take place from 23 to 27 January 2019 at the Světozor and Pilotů cinemas in Prague. As in the past, the festival offers an overview of the latest short films from around the world. This year’s festival also includes an homage to Ingmar Bergman, stories about female protagonists from the Amazon region, short films by an award-winning international Portuguese filmmaker, visual experiments, a children’s program, a virtual reality zone, a day dedicated to short Czech films (including a National Competition), an emceed night screening full of horror, and the best short live-action films from the past two years’ International Competition section.

“Next January brings the fourteenth Prague Short Film Festival, a sister event to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Over the past several years, the festival has formed its own tradition and fan base. We are glad that, through Prague Shorts, we have been able to offer audiences not just the best works of contemporary short film from around the world, but that the competition section also offers young Czech filmmakers a place to present their creations in an area that has been gaining in popularity among audiences,” states Jiří Bartoška, president of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

The festival’s main section, an international competition section of short live-action films with a running time of no more than 30 minutes, presents nearly twenty films from around the world. The winner will take home the festival’s main prize, which includes a financial reward of 2,000 euros. The winner of the Czech competition will receive the same amount. This year’s juries include Polish director and screenwriter Tomasz

Wasilewski (United States of Love, 2016), internationally renowned American film critic, video-essayist, and filmmaker Kevin B. Lee, and independent programmer Laurence Reynolds.

The section Bergman Revisited celebrates the 100th anniversary of the birth of one of the most important directors and cinematic auteurs of the 20th century, Ingmar Bergman. As part of the section, we will be presenting short films by six Swedish directors who, each in their own way, reflect on Bergman’s work. Audiences will be treated to films by, among others: director and actress Pernilla August, whom they will recognize from Bergman’s classic Fanny and Alexander or as Anakin Skywalker’s mother Shmi from the Star Wars saga; Tomas Alfredson, director of the spy drama Tinker Tailor Soldier

Spy, and Patrik Eklund, whose short films regularly win awards at Cannes or Sundance and whose film Instead of Abracadabra, previously shown at the Prague Short Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award in the short film category.

In Amazona, a section focused on the Amazon region of South America, the festival presents stories of strong and unyielding female protagonists such as director João Paulo Miranda Maria’s The Girl Who Danced with the Devil, which won a special jury mention at the Cannes film festival, and Violet Sunday by director Ana Cristina Barragán, whose feature-length Alba was Ecuador’s nomination for last year’s Oscars.

The Cannes film festival’s independent section – La Quinzaine des réalisateurs, a.k.a. Directors’ Fortnight – was created in 1969 as a direct response to the events of 1968 in an attempt at presenting lesser known filmmakers in a less flashy manner, and completely independently from the festival’s main program. Over the years, this section – sometimes referred to simply as Quinzaine – has shown films by George Lucas, Ken Loach, Michael Haneke, and Spike Lee, among others. Independent programmer Laurence Reynolds – a member of this year’s National Competition section who in recent years has been responsible for choosing the short films for the

Directors’ Fortnight – presents a selection of short films from the past seven years, including Czech animator and director Michaela Pavlátová’s Tram and award-winning Columbian director Franco Lolli’s Rodri.

Portuguese director Gabriel Abrantes has several festival awards under his belt. His most recent feature film, Diamantino (which was shown at Karlovy Vary IFF) was deservedly called the most unusual film at Cannes in 2018, where it took home two awards – the Palm Dog and the Independent Critics’ Award. Abrantes’s short films, his original filmmaking style, and his fresh ideas will be presented through four films, including Freud und Friends, which has been shown at nearly twenty festivals throughout the world, and The Artificial Humors, which was shown in competition at last year’s Prague Short Film Festival.

As in past years, the festival program includes the popular Brutal Relax Show – an evening of extreme and horror shorts – and the LABO section of films on the boundary between experimental and conventional live-action cinema, films that use fresh narrative and stylistic techniques where the point is less to tell a story than to provide a primal viewing experience of the moving image. Also this year, the festival remembers our youngest audiences and their parents: Children aged 5 to 8 and their parents can look forward to Pragueshorts for Kids on Saturday 26 January 2019 at 3pm at Bio Oko and on 27 January 2019 at 3pm at the Aero cinema. The children’s screenings, organized in collaboration with Aeroškola, are followed by an art and drama workshop.

The 14th Prague Short Film Festival takes place from 23 to 27 January 2019 at the Světozor and Pilotů cinemas. Tickets will be available on sale at both cinemas prior to the festival’s opening.

Print-quality photographs for the various sections and other visual materials can be downloaded from: http://pragueshorts.com/cs/media

More information at www.pragueshorts.com.

Press contact: Zuzana Janáková, press@pragueshorts.com, +420 724 577 576