RIFF Seventh edition
Welcome to RIFF: R.E.D. International Film Festival, dance-art-cinema. For the seventh year in a row we are happy to celebrate dance, art, and the various possible audiovisual expressions that have a relation with movement.
The festival will be celebrated from July 8th to 10th, 2022. This year’s theme is EXPLORING THE WORLD, and we continue our vision of building bridges between the performing and visual arts and the film industry.
The official selection consists of 26 international films, including 3 norwegian films. With the festival and its curatorship, as well as its different events, we would like to contribute a little to society, taking culture as a weapon. This will help us take by storm the right to enjoy life and feel hope again, for humanity and its habitat: the planet. We would like to defend the right of all human beings to experience joy, compassion, and love.
For those who will be present at the festival we offer a variety of events, with CAFÉ EXPERIANCE, a two hours journey through performance and dance, installations and art, film, music and meals, as one of our highlights. The concept is developed by Ella Fiskum and is a collaboration with our Shooting Star, Festival Artist and dance and performance artists in residence at R.E.D.
Throughout RIFF MAGAZINE 2022 we virtually distribute the films that are part of our RIFF Official Selection that have been carefully selected by the RIFF curatorial group.
Welcome to our festival, whether it is digital or in person.
Ella Fiskum
Festival Director
This film uses dance in a very innovative and intensely colorful way. Polish Dance Theatre dancers are moving swiftly and creating the illusion of flying over the canvas telling micro-stories of love. The dancers and choreography are excellent. And it’s all set to the fine music of the norwegian composer: Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt.
Short Film Winner: Herbarium
“On Mending” is a dance film that shows how extremely expressive and communicative dance is, as a language. It is filmed in an impressive Alpine landscape, with mountains and waterfalls surrounding the skilled suggestive dancers, and we, as an audience, experience a range of feelings, from love, caring, loss and acceptance.
Short Film Winner: On Mending
It’s a masterful piece, having the structure of a dance film without spoken words, and also of a narrative feature film inspired by Os Pobres, a novel by Paul Brandäo. We find feelings of exile, loss, decadence, remembrance, nostalgia, even humor. Dance theater is emotively interpreted, reminding of Pina Bausch’s taste. The photographs and images are composed in a very fine artistically way, making definitely a grand scale classic Italian film.
Feature Film Winner: Elegy of Lost Things
Settled in Kingali, Rwanda, this documentary is about a group of passionate dancers. It takes you through the life of one of them who is trying to answer the reasons why he dances since the rest of his life seems to be out of the optimus desirable results: economically, socially and to the eyes of his family. This group takes dance as the liberation possibility to dignify their role in this world. Passion, power, inspiration, fresh emotions and a big human sense are shown in “Why I dance”. All these expressions happen in natural, rural and urban landscapes from Kingali, making a tough dialogue between the young dancers and the locations. It makes sense to speak of a potential way out of a dark destiny by taking passion to dance as a weapon.
Documentary Winner and Audience Award: Why I Dance
“The Swan at the Mouth of the River” tries to change the perception of a gender roll dancing the classical piece “The Dying Swan”, since it is danced by a male dancer, Bernd Burgmaier, who’s danced this piece many times in his performing life; and now that he is older, as an expert, he tells possible changes to express better the feeling of a dying animal, as he observes birds dying. So, this documentary overflows moral and gender issues, as well as age issues, questioning the best age to interpret a role. Daphna Mero manages an excellent script, camera, and editing to bring this piece to life.
Honorary Mention: The Swan at the Mouth of the River
The jury
Odd Johan Fritzøe (NO)
Born 1962, educated from the State Ballet School in Oslo - dancing and choreographies.
The collaboration between dance, visual arts, and norwegian composers has evolved into a distinctive artistic idiom – abstract and relevant. Also the founder of CODA - Oslo international dance festival.
Francesca N. Penzani (IT/USA)
Francesca N. Penzani, educated at London Contemporary Dance School and California Institute of the Arts. Since 1999, she has taught Dance for the Camera and Integrated Media at California Institute of the Arts, where she also started CineDance.
Francesca has created collaborative and interdisciplinary classes at CalArts, been a guest artist in Taiwan, Munich, and taught laboratories in Mexico, Cuba and at RIFF in Norway.
Penzani has received several awards for her films from among others Women International Film Festival and International Independent Film Awards. Her newest dance film “Double Up” has been screened at more than 30 international film festivals and has won various awards. Francesca is a Faculty Emerita from CalArts and moving back to Italy in summer 2022.
Ella Fiskum (NO) - RIFF Artistic Director
Ella hails from Trondheim, Norway. She was educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, under Natalia Papina in St. Petersburg, and at the John Cranko Schule in Stuttgart.
After working extensively as a contemporary dancer, she founded Ella Fiskum Danz working both as a choreographer, dancer, director, and producer. With 30 years of experience, producing over 19 full length stage productions and 21 films, she has received international awards and toured the world.
In 2012 Fiskum relocated to a farm outside Oslo for the purpose of building up R.E.D. - an International Center for the Arts, which she is running. R.E.D. became a Regional Competence Center for Dance in 2018, and, since 2021, it’s funded by the government.
She received the Vestre Toten Culture Prize in 2019, OA in 2020, and a five year working Government Grant (2021-2025). Fiskum founded RIFF in 2015.
Yolanda M. Guadarrama (MX) - RIFF Curator
Yolanda M. Guadarrama. Mexican. Engineer, dancer, choreographer, audiovisual creator, coeditor of MOHO Magazine and Editorial. She is dedicated to the creation, exhibition and promotion of screendance, she made her first screendance in 1994.
Movimiento en Movimiento Director (2013-2022). She was Cofounder of Motion festival in Berlin, 2008. Curator for RIFF festival, Norway for 7 years. She was a Screendance judge at LIFF, UK, 2017.
Her work AILING ANIMAL obtained honorable mention in Agite y Sirva, 2015. POTATO EATERS obtained first place as an experimental short, Eurasia International Monthly Film Festival, 2018.
Her works have been exhibited in several international festivals. She is a member of RED IBEROAMERICANA DE VIDEODANZA-Screendance Iberoamerican Net (REDIV).
