In 2022, DOBRA – International Experimental Film Festival reaches its 8th consecutive edition, celebrating the return to face-to-face activities and bringing a diversified program. Between September 22nd and 24th, the event occupies the Cinemateca of MAM with an overview of Brazilian and international production of experimental cinema, holding exhibitions in analog and digital formats, book launches and debates. At the end of the in-person activities, the festival will have an online sequence, from September 25th to October 2nd.
As in previous editions, the Convocation Programs are the flagship of DOBRA. This year, there will be five thematic programs, totaling 41 films selected from the more than 1,000 entries received at the Call, which opened last July. The festival's curatorship, formed by Cristiana Miranda and Lucas Murari, identified themes that stood out in the artists' work, such as the aesthetic investigation of the landscape, the search for a poetic and political approach in the analysis of urban spaces, creation from the technical and stylistic inventiveness and the strategic use of deviation in the reuse of archival images.
The Convocation Programs outline a vast panorama of contemporary experimental production worldwide. In addition to films from Brazil, they have representatives from Germany, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Spain, the United States, France, Italy, Mexico, Paraguay and the United Kingdom.
In addition to the programs of the call, DOBRA's 2022 program will feature two special programs, shown on the first day of the festival, September 22.
The Expanded Nature program brings together works by renowned visual artists – Rose Lowder, Chris Welsby, Charlotte Pryce, Coletivo Los Ingrávidos, Jonathas de Andrade and Daniel Steegmann Mangrané – produced from the 1970s onwards and which discuss the concept of Nature. These are works that use ecological practices as creative tools – it is the case of placing flowers on the film, burying the film, inventing observation devices, letting the camera be affected by natural forces, engaging the filming body in a symbiotic relationship with the environment and reconstitute ecosystems in the projection, among other artistic procedures. This program is based on works analyzed and discussed in the anthology “Expanded Nature – Écologies du cinéma expérimental”, organized by Elio Della Noce and Lucas Murari (Ed. LightCone, 2022), a book that brings together 22 international collaborators on the subject and which will be released in DOBRA.