“We really found the festival outstanding, full of soul, and especially loved the energy of the Lab. Good selection of projects and a variety of mentors, full of constructive and generous discussions.”
- Tristan Ferland Milewski, film director & composer My Name is Claude (Dream Boat), 2018 fARAD Lab mentors“The Lab at FARAD is a great joy to participate in, I think both as a Mentor-filmmaker and as a presentor-filmmaker. The quality of free-flowing discussion is high and commensurate with the quality and experience of the practitioner-filmmakers and other members of the film community that are invited to participate in the Lab. Theme, narrative structure and form are given full consideration with a number of practical solutions shared for solving problems that the presentor-filmmakers have encountered in the process of exploring and developing their projects."
- Pascale Lamche, film director (Winnie) and 2017 fARAD Lab mentor
fARAD Lab continues, for its 8th edition, to its traditional in-person format, which includes feedback sessions on the development projects of the invited participants offered by the festival guests, and an intensive practical workshop dedicated to the sound of documentary film as part of the creative vision held by Dana Bunescu, premier editor and sound designer in contemporary Romanian cinema. The Lab will be held November 22-25, 2023 at Cinema Arta in Arad in the framework of the 10th fARAD Documentary Film Festival.
The Lab is geared towards documentary filmmakers - directors, editors, sound professionals etc. - interested in creative documentary and innovative non-fiction forms, who have completed at least one short and at most one feature documentary.
Three projects selected to take part in the 2023 fARAD Lab are:
Launched at the fARAD Documentary Film Festival in 2016, it is a unique creative laboratory, partially modeled after the laboratories of Sundance, Independent Filmmaker Project and IDFA.Participants are exposed not only to technical or formal information, but also to a whole network of continuous professional support and mentoring from top professionals from the national and international community of documentarians.
PAST EDITIONS
Nearly 50 young filmmakers have taken part in the fARAD Laboratory since 2016, with many projects having gradually become completed, gaining national as well as international recognition. Notable among them, A Rifle and a Bag by Cristina Haneș and Isabella Rinaldi (Special Mention "Bright Future", Rotterdam 2020), Superhombre by Lucian Mircu and Mircea Gherase (selected in various festivals dedicated to nature and adventure, and released in Romanian theatres in 2020), Tudor Platon's House of Dolls (nominated for the 2022 Gopo Awards), Dragoș Hanciu's Shadow Man (released in cinemas in 2022) and the short film A Death in My Family by Andra Tarara (which became the starting point for her feature film film debut, Us against Us, 2021 Astra FF winner).
Along with Dana Bunescu, numerous documentary film professionals offered young filmmakers the creative support needed to advance their projects. These included directors Magnus Gertten (Sweden), Pedro Ruiz (Canada), Victor Moreno (Spain), Pascale Lamche (UK), Vaishali Sinha, Edin Velez and Bo Wang (USA), Nikolaj Møller (Denmark), Marianna Kakaounaki (Greece), Ognjen Glavonić (Serbia), Nora Agapi, Alexandru Belc, Laurențiu Damian, Monica Lăzurean-Gorgan, Titus Muntean and Vlad Petri (Romania), and producers Steven Lake (UK) and Bianca Oana (RO). They were joined by the festival's creative team: film director Mona Nicoară (fARAD Artistic Director for its first five editions), fARAD's current Artistic Director Dimitris Kerkinos, film curator Mihai Chirilov and the president of the festival, Corina Șuteu.
A series of masterclasses were also offerred thoughout these past editions by U.S. editor Erin Casper (editing masterclass, 2017), director Tristan Ferland Milewski and composer My Name is Claude (Germany, music masterclass in 2018), director Laurențiu Damian (Fiction in Documentary Filmmaking, 2019), director Alexander Nanau and journalist and co-director Mihai Grecea (on Directing and Sound Recoding in Observational Documentary, 2019).
For more info, contact us at:
laborator [@] farad.ro, +40-741-880-208