Skopje, 10 July 2023 (MIA) – The 22nd edition of the Festival of European Film “Cinedays” is set to kick off on Thursday with a Macedonian premiere of Vardan Tozija’s feature film “M” in the park of the Youth Cultural Center (YCC) in Skopje. Another premiere of a Macedonian film – “The Business of Pleasure” directed by Goce Cvetanovski, is set to close the Festival on July 18.

As part of the Festival, under the slogan “Movie Night”, 40 films from the latest work of European cinema and short films will be showcased from July 13 through to July 18. Over 50 guests are expected to attend, three music events will be held, as well as seven workshops. The novelty of this year’s edition is the Film Critics’ Jury, with the expectation that it will be an officially accredited FIPRESCI jury next year.

The Program Coordinator of Cinedays, Margarita Arsova, at a press conference Monday stressed that despite the significantly reduced budget, with the professionalism and enthusiasm of the YCC team, they’ve managed to draw up an excellent program that does not deviate from its high ambitions.

“Once again, we are directly importing the film program of this year’s Cinedays from Cannes. We have a wonderful program in the official selection and in the Cine Balkan selection with young and promising European directors and guests from the films. We will hold a roundtable discussion over the challenges we face as a country in terms of film distribution and the shortage of cinema halls, in order to assess where we stand, so that all our work can have some kind of context and future, because we currently have more film festivals than cinema halls in the country,” said Arsova.

The Festival’s program will include international and domestic films and co-productions as part of the Official Selection, Gala Program, SEE Program, MK Shorts and a retrospective dedicated to films with David Bowie as an actor.

“As part of the compact program of this year’s festival we will see titles by Wim Wenders, Ken Loach, Nanni Moretti, Aki Kaurismäki, François Ozon, Alexander Sokurov… And we also have five premieres of Macedonian short films. Due to budget restrictions, the program focuses on quality over quantity,” said Arsova.

Due to the reduced budget, this year’s program will be screened at two locations – in YCC and the Cinematheque of North Macedonia. The tickets for all screenings will cost Mden 200.

The 22nd edition of Cinedays will also include a masterclass with Mitko Panov and a screening of his film “The Witness”, as well as two other masterclasses with Jure Matičič, the programmer of the Slovenian Mestni kino Domžale, and Gabriele Brunnenmeyer, who works as an independent consultant for the MIDPOINT Institute.

Additionally, two workshops will be held as part of the Festival, the first one titled “Self-Tape and Online Casting in the Digital Era” will be held by award-winning casting director Luci Lenox, while the second one, titled “Basics of Film Language” is aimed for children under 15, and will be held by film and TV director Sasha Stanishikj.

The Festival is being held with the support of the Cinematheque of North Macedonia, Publicis, EU for YOU, Goethe Institute, the North Macedonia Film Agency and several companies.