Logo of International Portrait Film Festival

Deadline
15 Jan 2025


Published: 19 Jun 2024
 Has submission fees
Short films


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International Portrait Film Festival

Sofia, Bulgaria


IPFF is on the path towards its fifth edition! Once again, we will celebrate short portrait cinema and art which explores, educates, and transforms.

PHILOSOPHY

A portrait is an image heavy with meaning. Layered and multifaceted, it has a visual, psychological, material, emotional and spiritual dimension. It can be political, conceptual, poetic. Or something else.

A portrait always undergoes a transformation. It imitates and repeats life, but becomes something or someone new along the way. It changes its original subject while capturing it. Then the portrait is transformed again through the mind of every brave interpreter.

A film portrait is a soul in the form of light encountering the canvas of the white screen while pairs of eyes are staring at its vastness. It is a trace. And a reverie. It is past, present, and future intertwined.

FOCUS

The portrait is the focus of the films that will be screened at the IPFF. We are looking for portrait films that have already been completed, as well as such that will be created with the concrete idea of 'portrait'. Of a person. A group of people. An object. Something invisible, but substantial. Of the self.

WELCOME

IPFF welcomes a wide range of films and filmmakers: students, professionals, from low budget to big-scale productions, alternative and independent films by individuals and by collectives or institutions.

AIM

IPFF aspires to bring together artists and viewers who sincerely long for enrichment with art, intellectual discussion, and an experience of cinema through a new prism - that of the portrait film.

CHARACTER

IPFF is a hybrid event. A symbiosis of intriguing live encounters and memorable virtual experiences. An interweaving of portrait cinema from around the world with debates, lectures, workshops.

DREAM

We dream and imagine that the IPFF is for those who profoundly need art and excitement. And for the ones who believe in cinema’s power to change us for the better. For the unafraid to search within the screen even when it offers a strange and experimental viewpoint, or difficult questions about human rights, war and the ecological crises of our shared present.


International Festival

Short film festival


 Fiction  Documentary  Animation  Other  Experimental  Music Video