Asian Film Festival Barcelona | AFFBCN 2021 this year reaches its ninth edition within the framework of the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Casa Asia.
Once again, the AFFBCN intends to bring to the national public productions of different cultures and ethnicities that come to us from Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Asia-Pacific, allowing the viewer to undertake a trip from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, to Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Bhutan, China, Hong Kong, Macao, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Philippines, Laos, Indonesia and Vietnam, to Australia and New Zealand, countries present in all editions of the AFFBCN.
The AFFBCN 2021 programme will continue to be distributed among the following sections: Official, Official Panorama, Discoveries, Netpac and Special, all in competition. The festival will also integrate into its programme the Retrospective dedicated, on this occasion, to Satyajit Ray (Calcutta, India, 1921), which will be held in collaboration with the Filmoteca de Catalunya, like other years. In addition, this edition we open a new front with the New Talents Hong Kong section, together with the HKIFF Hong Kong International Film Festival.
For the director of the festival, Menene Gras Balaguer, “it is a plural and representative cinema of the geographical, political, economic and cultural diversity of an unequal continent”. And she emphasizes that “when we talk about Asian cinema we cannot stop referring to the scope of its development during the last decade”.
In this inclusive framework that the festival would like to be, all the productions presented at the Asian Film Festival Barcelona | AFFBCN come together from the first edition that took place in 2011 until today.
On the other hand, the programme is expanded with the OFF-AFFBCN, which is proposed as an introduction and an extension of the festival, and which allows us to expand the calendar in which we can offer this type of cinema throughout the year. This extension consists of three series: Asian Cinema outside Barcelona, Asian Cinema in Girona Cinemas (Retrospectives and Monographs) with weekly periodicity, Asian Cinema in Girona Cinemas (School Programming) and Asian Cinema in Betevé.
