Dis­cov­er the free online film fes­ti­val which cel­e­brates Europe

Going to see a movie at a film fes­ti­val often involves a lot of intri­cate for­ward plan­ning. ArteKino Fes­ti­val is designed specif­i­cal­ly to remove all those myr­i­ad logis­ti­cal night­mare fac­tors and to make sure you can enjoy a new movie with the max­i­mum of ease and the min­i­mum of stress.

The con­cept of the annu­al ArteKino fes­ti­val is offer a hand-picked selec­tion of new films – many from young or first-time film­mak­ers – and make them avail­able online for a lim­it­ed time and with a lim­it­ed num­ber of ​“tick­ets” for each title. Then, you step into the shoes of the jury by vot­ing for the film you believe deserves to take home the ArteKino Audi­ence Award. All the strange rules and weird stra­ta of tra­di­tion­al fes­ti­vals are removed, so every­one can enjoy all aspects of the expe­ri­ence at an instant.

We know how to see the films, the ques­tion remains: what is on offer this year? The intrigu­ing 2019 slate com­pris­es a jour­ney through Europe, show­cas­ing dark­ness and light, hor­ror and beau­ty, pol­i­tics and poet­ry. Any­one who believes that explor­ing a country’s artis­tic out­put is a good way to under­stand the cur­rent health of its soci­ety might want to catch Self­ie by Agosti­no Fer­rente and Nor­mal by Adele Tul­li, two films which pick apart con­cepts of gen­er­a­tional malaise by look­ing at the dig­i­tal­ly-pow­ered world full of malign influ­ences in which Ital­ian teenagers grow up.

Mean­while, head­ing north to Ger­many, Thir­ty by Simona Kos­to­va glances through a 24 hour win­dow on the activ­i­ties of a group of mil­len­ni­als in the hip dis­trict of Berlin’s Neukölln. It pro­pos­es the rise of what one might call the ​“quar­ter-life cri­sis”. Psy­chobitch, by Nor­we­gian direc­tor Mar­tin Lund, looks at out­sider­dom in schools, and how the edu­ca­tion sys­tem can be seen as a soci­o­log­i­cal chem­istry set to test the best and worst aspects of our for­ma­tive behav­iour­al growth.

From the grow­ing pains to the suf­fer­ing that comes with being a par­ent, Stitch­es, by Miroslav Terz­ić, is a Ser­bia-set dra­ma which looks at the lega­cy of Euro­pean con­flict, as a moth­er bakes a birth­day cake for the child she believes was stolen from her at birth and sold on the black mar­ket. The men­tal health of the indi­vid­ual is expand­ed out to diag­nose the health of a nation in Louise Narboni’s Chan­son Triste and Ulaa Salim’s Sons of Den­mark, both of which look at the fraught and anx­i­ety-filled lives of refugees in France and Den­mark respectively.

With Mes­si and Maud by Mar­leen Jonkman, Ruth by António Pin­hão Botel­ho and Thirst by Svet­la Tsot­sorko­va round­ing out the main slate, this is also an oppor­tu­ni­ty to dis­cov­er some of the cin­e­mat­ic stars of tomor­row. So grab it while you can.

For more info vis­it artekinofes​ti​val​.com