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NIFFF 2020

The 2020 edition of the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival goes online

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- Because of the ongoing health crisis, the NIFFF is pushing back its landmark 20th edition to 2021

The 2020 edition of the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival goes online
The directors of the web series Bâtards, Malou Briand and Raphaël Meyer, at NIFFF 2019 (© Claire Zombas)

“Keeping the original format of the festival intact is impossible in light of the current health crisis and its impact on the film industry,” state the organisers of the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival (NIFFF), while still specifying, however, that they will do everything in their power to promote genre film and support audiovisual productions. The festivities for the 20th edition will therefore be postponed until 2021 – and along with them also the “Sauvage” retrospective and the Virtual Worlds exhibition at the Neuchâtel National Natural History Museum, as well as the premiere of Bâtards, a web series by Malou Briand and Raphaël Meyer. Nevertheless, the NIFFF is not throwing in the towel, and has decided to maintain the bond it has forged with the audience and the realm of fantastic film. For that reason, it has chosen to organise an alternative edition in digital form this year.

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From 3-11 July, the NIFFF will therefore provide audiences with a retrospective entitled Fantastique 20 20 20 along with an exclusive digital programme. The retrospective will allow viewers to relive 20 years of important fantastic films – important not only for the festival itself, but also in terms of the development and evolution of genre cinema. This major retrospective will kick off on 15 May on Swiss TV channels and will continue in the autumn in the festival’s partner movie theatres, but also in various Swiss institutions dedicated to the audiovisual field. This travelling film programme will be unveiled in May and will carry on unspooling until the 20th edition of the gathering in 2021.

Besides this jam-packed retrospective, the NIFFF intends to celebrate the imagination – which is “necessary and healthy for humankind and for society”, as stated by the organisers – through an exclusive digital programme (running from 3-11 July) that will be accessible on demand, for a fee, and which will include around 20 movies that will be duking it out for the RTS Audience Award. The audience will be able to vote by using an app developed by the festival.

In addition to this, the event will launch NIFFF TV, a daily live show (viewable free of charge) that will accompany and provide commentary on the digital programme, and which will allow the audience and the festival to discuss and reflect on the present state of fantastic film. The show will be filmed in a pop-up TV studio. The NIFFF maintains that this digital edition will be one of a kind and that the 2021 iteration will take place as planned in Neuchâtel. Further details and the full programme will be unveiled on 18 June.

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(Translated from Italian)

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