The 9th CineLibri International Book and Movie Festival will take place in Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna, Burgas, Veliko Tarnovo, Gabrovo and Stara Zagora between October 6 and 29, 2023.
The 2023 festival's motto, Metamorphoses, pays tribute to Franz Kafka's 140th birth anniversary. Appropriately, Orson Welles's The Trial will be screened at a theme gala.
Some of the 60-plus screen adaptations of literary works that will be presented at this year's CineLibri come with honours from Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Toronto and other international film festivals.
There are four competitions for the submissions: for a full-length feature film, a documentary, a short film, and costume design.
The eleven entries in the full-length feature competition include Yorgos Lanthimos's Poor Things, starring Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe, which will open the festival at Hall 1 of Sofia's National Palace of Culture on October 6 - ahead of the movie's release dates in both the US and the UK.
A Cinema with a Cause section is set aside for titles dealing with hot topics. Some of those not to be missed: Between Revolutions (Romania/Qatar/Iran/Croatia), which also competes for best documentary, The New Woman Montessori (France, about the famous Italian educator), Operation Napoleon (Iceland/Germany), and Being Christo Pimpirev (Bulgaria, about the Antarctic explorer).
The centrepiece of the CineLibri biopics section is Dance First (about literary giant Samuel Beckett, played by Gabriel Byrne). The same module also includes Alma & Oskar (about Alma Mahler and Viennese art scene enfant terrible Oskar Kokoschka) and Dante, inspired by Boccaccio's treatise about the Renaissance poet.
Among the competing documentaries, Wim Wenders's Anselm focuses on Anselm Kiefer, one of the greatest contemporary artists, and Mona Achache's Little Girl Blue is a docudrama about the director's mother, French writer and photographer Carole Achache.
Of the eight entries in this year's short films competition, five are Bulgarian, one is Portuguese, one from North Macedonia, and one from Poland. Stefan Voivodov's Oceania is reminiscent of Orwell's 1984. In Aleksandra Kardalevska's The Script, literary characters get lost in a fantastic world. Manuel Matos Barbosa's O Antiquario is an animated cartoon based on Fialho de Almeida's short novel.
The full-length features will be judged by an international jury led by Hollywood star William Baldwin and including Canadian casting director and producer Bruno Rosato, French director and actress Lea Todorov (daughter of world famous intellectual Tzvetan Todorov), much loved Bulgarian film and stage actor Ivan Barnev, and Spanish actress Carla Nieto. The winner will be announced on October 20 at the National Palace of Culture. There, the awards ceremony will be followed immediately by a screening of Roman Polanski's latest work, The Palace (starring Fanny Ardant, Oliver Masucci and Mickey Rourke, among others). This will be the first time that the dark comedy will be seen in public after its world premiere in Venice.
At the 9th CineLibri, cinema lovers will also be able to attend dozens of sideline events: discussions, celebrations, retrospectives, gala evenings, workshops and public meetings with world-famous guests and jury members.
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