11th Norient Film Festival (NNF) Bern 2022, Jan 12-16 (online and offiline)

20 years of Norient

Curated by an International Team from India, Lebanon, Switzerland, and the U.K.

The Norient Film Festival is co-curating its upcoming 11th edition (12–16 January 2022, Bern + online) for the first time with a multidisciplinary team, working from India, Lebanon, Switzerland, and the U.K. NFF pushes forward its experimental nature and celebrates Norient’s 20th anniversary (2002–2022) with a big step forward. The program is broader than before, with strong regional focus on the U.K., the Arab World, India, and Switzerland, including live performances, installations, and audiovisual lectures. The vision of the new NFF and Norient is to work towards a festival of the future and to become a stronger, innovative, co-curated hub for upcoming artists and thinkers, film, new audiovisual formats, music, and sound.

The NFF Program

After two years of social distancing and a very successful online edition in 2021, the NFF returns to the big screen, audience in tow. With a mixture of fiction and documentary films, Norient created a festival program that speaks the language of diversity, with films from South and North America, Africa, India, the Arab world, and Europe. The program emphasizes ideas of sensation, perception, and the senses; life and death, politics and romance, music and dance, silence and noise all make appearances. Audiovisual performances, live concerts, panel discussions, and DJ sets feature many renowned artists from the U.K. and beyond, such as multidisciplinary artist Mark Fell, electronic acts Rian Treanor and Giant Swan, drummer Julian Sartorius, and singer-songwriter-duo Ruth and Res Margot from Bern.

NSNS strongly recommend to go check out the website and the Program Day By Day. The curation of movies, live performances and audiovisual formats NFF put together (not just this year) is one of a kind. Here a short selection.

Program Day By Day: click here.

The festival will open on Wednesday, January 12, 2022, with a psychedelic performance by London- based audiovisual duo Sculpture and the Oscar-awarded film «Sound of Metal» by Darius Marder, a fictional film about a heavy metal drummer who suddenly turns deaf. Further selected program highlights are a documentary about punks in Indonesia (A Punk Daydream), a film about the struggles of a female background singer in Bollywood (Shut Up Sona), and an archive-documentary on the Italian cantautore Lucio Dalla (For Lucio). Co-artistic director Chafic Tabbara will discuss present-day filmmaking in the Arab World with Lebanese sound designer Rana Eid (Beirut: Traces of a City – a Pod Poem), and Moroccan director Ali Essafi (Before the Dying of the Light) and Delhi-based co-curator Radha Mahendru will present histories of resistance from India through words and songs in an afternoon performative lecture.

Curated by an International Team

The NFF 2022 sees video and sound artist Rebecca Salvadori (London, resp. for the music/live section) and film critic Chafic Tabbara (Beirut, resp. for the film section) as artistic directors working together with an international team of curators: associate professor in film and television history Dr. Monia Acciari (Leicester), photographer and filmmaker Claudia Popvici (Zurich), curator, arts manager, and cultural producer Radha Mahendru (New Delhi), and independent filmmaker Tamara Milosevic (Bern).

Official trailer:

About the 11th NFF and 20 Years of Norient

The NFF explores the contemporary world through music and sound and is often termed a leading festival for film and sound worldwide. Founded ten years ago by Thomas Burkhalter (director of Norient, ethnomusicologist, and AV-artist) and Michael Spahr (video artist, co-director of editions 1–4), the NFF intended from the beginning to present deep stories, research, and thought from across the globe through captivating, experimental, and at times challenging films, AV performances, concerts, DJ sets, video lectures, and other digital formats.

About Norient

Norient (https://norient.com) was founded in 2002 – a play on words meaning No Orientalism, and an allusion to Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism from 1978. Our concern was and is not only to program films, music, sounds, and audiovisual works from outside the Euro-American world, but also to make a perceptive selection and to share the power of curation with actors outside Europe. According to the composer and musicologist Georg E. Lewis, the internationalization of curatorial decisions makes an important contribution to the project of decolonization in general. Norient has already gained experience regarding methodology and challenges with collective curation in several projects (in the podcast series «Timezones», the exhibition «DisOrient», the publication «Sonic Traces: From Italy» as well as in the planned virtual exhibition series «Norient City Sounds»).