The flourishing CineFest, International Festival of Young Filmmakers in September attracts thousands of film fans and visitors from the whole world. Housing in a brand-new cultural complex and the beautiful old Kossuth Cinema, the 5th CineFest provides an unique look into international young cinema’s landscape, screening features, documentaries, experimental works and animated shorts from all over the world.
Hungary’s freshest young film festival celebrates its 5th anniversary this year. This year CineFest received 280 films from 48 countries. Most of the films came from Central Europe, from the US and Germany, but we received films from Indonesia to South America. After a pre-selection, the top 67 films have the opportunity to compete in the official program.

At the end of Cinefest International Film Festival for young filmmmakers Péter Madaras, the programme director of the festival answered to our questions.

How would you define the festival, what does it represent on a map of European film festivals?
Obviously it represents something freshness, which comes from the manner of the festival “for young filmmakers”. So it is fresh, new, a bit different than any others, a bit extreme. Since many youngsters participating the festival it is really familiar, cool. Just as on your site, Daazo.com, short films are made by young directors mainly. As the festival is organized by young people, it is a great party for us too.

You receive many films each year. What kind of opportunities do you have for announcing the festival on international level?
The easiest way is to collect partner festivals, and cross-promote each other. We appear on their festival, have banners in their catalogue. And since we have to spend money sometime, we appear in Cannes, Berlin and some other bigger festival.

Cinefest celebrates its 5th birthday. What is the future of the festival? Would you change something in the future?
We used to say the festival is in adult age already! We don’t want to be an “A” category film festival, that needs world premieres, hell a lot of money and it cannot take place in a small city. We started as something different. We want to be a well know, big festival, which is accepted and liked by young filmmakers. It would be really great if filmmakers thought they need to send their films to this festival, because it was a serious milestone for them. Then we could have more and more exciting off-programmes.

Is there any kind of film what the Festival prefers? What is the image of the festival filmwise?
Of course we would like to shape a specific image of the festival. Step by step we try to set a permanent pre-selection jury. Naturally their taste defines the selection of the festival. Nevertheless we have more and more melancholic films. A good example for this is the awarded film “In Transit”, which is a melancholic, sweet short film without clichés. I think we have more and more film like that. But I think we are too young to have a real image, but in a couple of years we gonna have it.

See the winners of this year’s festival! Click!