Press Release #9/21

Festival preparations are fully underway, YAAAS! Young Programmers 2022 & Film submissions still possible until 7 January

 
22.12.2021 // After 18 years of successful foundational work, Christine Dollhofer handed over the directorial agendas to Sabine Gebetsroither and Katharina Riedler. Also under this new leadership, CROSSING EUROPE is aiming to bring together the expectations of professional, as well as international and local audiences. The festival program 2022 is focused on sociopolitically aware, and artistic, eccentric filmmaking – this and the attendance of multiple film guests intend to get everyone excited about unconventional European film. In order to be able to reach this goal in the coming April, one of the main issues we are facing this year is to create incentives for those interested in film to return to the cinema and to make the live cinema experience attractive again, while still taking care of the health and safety of the audience.

In exactly 18 weeks, on Wednesday 27 April, the 19th edition of CROSSING EUROPE Film Festival Linz will begin. According to the current state of affairs, CROSSING EUROPE 2022 will take place as a physical event. Over the course of six days, the festival will give a differentiated point of view on European lived realities through circa 130 shorts, feature films, and documentaries. Besides the presentation of ambitious European filmmaking, one of the central focal points of the festival is the direct exchange between cinema audiences and 120 filmmakers from all over Europe (according to the current state of planning).

The work on the film program for the 19th festival edition is already heavily underway. Hundreds of film submissions have already reached us and so we have begun an intense phase of selecting films.That is why we are calling all filmmakers to submit their current productions for the upcoming festival edition. The submission deadline for all program sections is 7 January 2022. (Details HERE).

The YAAAS! Youth Program will also be part of the program architecture in the coming spring and revolves around film education, acquirement of media competency and DIY video production for young people aged between fifteen and twenty. The YAAAS! Competition will comprise six current European film productions that were selected by the YAAAS! Young Programmers: Andrea Reininger, Julia Stöckl, Marco Barthofer, Marie-Louise Schmidinger, Marlene Frostel und Oliver Parsch all attend our partner school, the HBLA for artistic design in Linz, and will watch around 15 films until end of January. Then they will announce their final film selection. 

In January 2022 the first program highlights will be presented in more detail.

The CROSSING EUROPE festival team would like to thank all our partners, funders, and sponsors for their continued support during this extraordinary year, and wishes everyone happy holidays and a good start into the new year! We are already looking forward to seeing everyone again for the nineteenth CROSSING EUROPE edition in April! Stay safe!

You can find the full press release on this page, pictures in high resolution can be found here, and our logo as well as the new fesival motif on our website

Comprehensive press release HERE: