Alternative Film/Video festival

Alternative Film/Video Festival was established in 1982 in Belgrade, Serbia (Yugoslavia). As a meeting place for artists, theorists, critics and the audience, the festival’s mission has been to record and theorise movements, promote constructive values and support new creative possibilities in visual media. The festival provides a glimpse of the current state of new film and video tendencies in the region and the world. The founder and the organizer of the festival is Academic Film Center Belgrade of Students’ City Cultural Center.

The festival was held for the first time in 1982 under the title Alternative Film Festival with the proclaimed intention to explore works which do not fit into established categories and which do not align with dominant commercial and aesthetic trends. The selection included various modes of alternative, experimental, art, personal and radical films. Since 1985 the festival changed its name to Alternative Film/Video and became one of the first film festivals in Europe to show films and videos equally in its competition selection. In that way, the festival established and further explored the relation of alternative film and video production to commercial and classical cinema, but also the relation between film and video aesthetics and production. Discontinued in 1990, the festival was reestablished in 2003, first as a regional (ex-Yugoslav) festival, and since 2006 as an international festival.

The festival programme usually consists of two multimedia exhibitions, an opening performance, a workshop and various public programmes. Accompanying programmes aim to form a referent frame for contextualizing the contemporary alternative and experimental cinema. The Alternative Film/Video Research Forum (since 2012) and the two open panel discussions: one about the festival theme and another one with jury members on the festival’s selection and awarded works. These discussions are transcribed and published annually since 2003.

The festival’s specificity since the beginning is that it doesn’t award films hierarchically – instead, the jury selects works for the List of the Significant Achievements of the festival.