Worldfilm. Tartu Festival of Visual Culture

Worldfilm is a meeting point of different cultures and a year-round importer of visual culture, ethnographical films and documentaries to Tartu.

The last week of March is dedicated to visual culture and well-selected documentaries from all over the world.

The organizers see documentary films as one of the most exciting film genres. Both the filmmakers and the audience are involved into a game, according to which, what we see in a film, „really happened“: this is what happened over there, at that time, in this place. The prerequisite of creating this kind of reality and playing this game, is a skilled storytelling. A film has to move skillfully between generalizations and rich details in a way that viewer can trust the author and follow her. Filmmakers and audience should share a common language in order to enter the space created with the tools of this language.

Documentary films can’t for a long time already be identified through their selection of topics or shooting locations – anthropological and ethnographic films are not films about inaccessible remote communities and the rest of the documentary film are not necessarily in dialogue with our own lives, either in contemporary time or in historical perspective.

The documentary language is nowadays used for talking about everything and new ways of telling the stories are continuously searched for.

Worldfilm festival has welcomed filmmakers from around the world presenting their work and great international audience. For both the audience and film makers, it has become known as an intimate event with warm atmosphere, enabling discussions both about film making and about the cultures, the filmmakers are telling about in their films.

The Worldfilm festival was initiated in 2004 in the Estonian National Museum, an institution, preserving and promoting visual culture among its other tasks. Therefore the festival also features photo exhibitions and other related events, including the special programs about the works of significant film directors involved in anthropological and ethnographic film making. Each year also a special program on Estonian documentary films is introduced.

The festival does not have a contest program.