The Fribourg International Film Festival (FIFF) is an annual film festival in Fribourg, Switzerland. It is focused on selected films from Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Grand Prize is the main award of the Fribourg International Film Festival.

The Festival

FIFF aims to promote the understanding between the cultures and more particularly between the so-called North and South. It gives preference to films that stimulate reflection and provoke discussion. In 1980, Magda Bossy, working for the Swiss NGO Helvetas, organized an event in honour of the 25th anniversary of the French-speaking Swiss association. Convinced that film would be an excellent medium for expressing cultural richness, the Egyptian native thinks to open the floor to filmmakers from the South. Its success – although varying city to city – calls for a second edition. In 1983, the second edition was entitled "Festival de Films du Tiers-Monde" (Third-World Film Festival). In 1992, the Festival de Films de Fribourg (the "Third-World" title is dropped in 1990) grows more professional with an artistic director Martial Knaebel working with two assistants. In autumn 1992, the Festival receives international recognition from UNESCO: the World Decade for Cultural Development seal. The ongoing evolution of the event is pronounced with the addition of "International" in the festival name in 1998. Also, the Grand Prize awarded by FIFF (Fribourg International Film Festival) becomes the Regard d’or, embodied in an original design by Fribourg sculptor Jean-Jacques Hofstetter. In 2001, the Regard d’or is awarded to Yi Yi, by Taiwanese director Edward Yang, marking one of the greatest successes for a FIFF première beyond the festival. A new artistic director, Edouard Waintrop, was named in 2007. He opened the festival to genre cinema. His successor, Thierry Jobin, put forward a redefinition of the FIFF sections: he makes the parallel sections more identifiable by using the same names that recur each year. The 29th edition breaks the record for any film festival ever held in western Switzerland with 40,000 tickets sold.

The Selection

The official selection includes both a long features and a short features competitions.

The Sections

Genre Cinema

2012 Western 2013 Sport Films 2014 Disaster Movies 2015 Erotic Movies 2016 Fighting Women Movies 2017 Ghost stories

Decryption

2012 Images of Islam in the Occident 2013 Abandoned children 2014 Economical crisis 2015 Can you laugh about anything? 2016 And Woman created Cinema 2017 A cinematic cabinet of curiosities

Diaspora

2012 Patrick Chappatte and Lebanon 2013 Atom Egoyan and Armenia 2014 Slava Bykov and Russia 2015 Tony Gatlif and the Roma 2016 Mira Nair and India 2017 Myret Zaki and Egypt

Hommage to…

2012 Pierre-Alain Meier, producer 2013 Martin Scorsese and the World Cinema Foundation 2014 History of Iranian Cinema by its Creators 2015 Syria, by Ossama Mohammed 2016 Ida Lupino, par Pierre Rissient 2017 Freddy Buache

Terra Incognita

2012 Bangladesh 2013 Uzbekistan 2014 Madagascar 2015 Indigenous North American cinema 2016 Being an African Female Filmmaker 2017 Nepal

On the Map of...

2012 Georges Schwizgebel 2013 Bouli Lanners 2014 Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne 2015 Jean-François Stévenin 2016 Geraldine Chaplin 2017 Douglas Kennedy