International Innovation & Film Festival (IIFF)

The first International Innovation and Film Festival (IIFF) was a great success in the Swiss capital. A highlight of every film festival is the announcement of the winners. At the first IIFF women were the big winners. On one hand they won the majority of the prizes and on the other hand women were in the majority with regards to participation in the panel talks, workshops and project presen-tations. But first things come first.

Marathon webinar
The festival opened with a ten hour webinar. The mayor of the Swiss capital, Alec von Graffenried, opened the event and welcomed all the participants that were attending from all over the world. As for our guest speakers they were from South-Africa, Canada, the USA, China, UK, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and Spain. On the attendees side the participation was
even more diverse.

There were attendees from all five continents even people from Canada and Australia were logging in.

One of the most attended panel talks was the one called „My Name is Penelope: Weavers of Destiny“ where Michèle Rükgauer explored the female perspective in film making and story.All talks and presentations held at the IIFF are available online so that everyone interested can follow up on content. The IIFF is a young, small, fresh and independent event, which makes it easier to create diversity. Thinking of the incumbent film industry giants, it might be an impossible endeavour to implement as much diversity, „,since it is a structural problem that has grown over decades. This lack of diversity can be traced back to the committee that selects the nominees in the Academy Awards (the Oscars). According to The Telegraph newspaper, the voting members of the Academy are 94% white, 77% male and have a median age of 62 years.

Hackathon
On day two the IIFF featured a youth hackathon conducted by the Cryptochicks from Canada. The Cryptochicks are conducting blockchain coding workshops all across the globe. The incentive is aimed at young girls and boys to awaken their interest in tackling coding and changing the world through code. Research shows that one of the Cryptochicks is the mother of the prodigy child Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of the Ethereum Blockchain. She has great knowledge in teaching children interest and curiosity and in fostering the adoption of computer technology.

The winning group developed a special technology that helps tracking wildlife animals in protected areas.

The project will be implemented in the reintroduction into the wild of the European bison in the Carpathian Mountains in a joint project of WWF and the Porini Foundation and possibly in a project in Namibia. The young hackers were attending from different high schools in and around Berne but there also were online participants from Berlin and Paris as well as a young hacker coming from the Uni Zürich and one from the eastern part of Switzerland.

Movie screenings
The hackathon was being followed by three days of movie screenings in the Cinematte. The film program was interesting enough that it attracted the visit of ambassadors of four countries attending six different events. Another highlight of the IIFF was as the ambassador of South Africa spontaneously decided to give a short speech after the very touching movie „Alison“. The audience and the film-maker, Uga Lisa Carlini, were extremely impressed, touched and grateful for the input of the ambassador. Carlini in the following won two prices; one for best director and the other for the best screenplay. Another woman that was also able to take home two prices with her film is the Swiss filmmaker and snowboarding athlete Anne-Flore Marxer. Her first movie „A land shaped by women“ won the best cinematography and the best soundtrack.

Marxer has been fighting for equality in the snowboarding business for a long time.

In her road-movie she visits Iceland, a land shaped by women. The movie is an amazing mixture between aesthetically pleasing and teasing pictures that are close to the aesthetics of the adver-tisement industry with portraits of impressive women in Iceland that have an impact on society. With this strategy she is able to connect to a much wider audience and reach spectators that might be attracted to the aesthetics and therefore place her messages indirectly.

Another challenge that she solved with an innovative approach is the much debated question about „who pays for content.“ In the very dynamic film-industry that has changed significantly in the course of the last ten years, the question is more pressing than ever. The very subtle and perfectly organic structure product placement has gone fully unnoticed in this movie. It allows the creation of a storytelling tool that reaches the audience with the positive emotions of the road movie and the breathtaking beauty of the nature in Iceland and places important questions about women in society right when your heart and soul is very open.

Further movies
The festival also featured two movies from Iran.

There is a long and ongoing debate on why Iran creates some of the best movies of the world; this is not the place for this debate.

One of the movies, „Golnesa“, featured a love story of two illegal immigrants from Afghanistan in Iran. After every movie there was a Skype-talk with the filmmaker. And this movie in particular created a long and very lively led debate on how relationships are possible in different cultural contexts and on the importance of codes in film based storytelling. The Swiss movie „The Divine Order (Die göttliche Ordnung)“ allowed a view back into the seventies of Switzerland. A professor from Basel, focusing on gender questions in education, followed up and led the debate after the movie which led to the key learning that not really much has happened since the seventies. One of the outcomes of the debate was that a way to a lasting change would be through education but choosing this path the teaching material would have to change in the first place.

Also taking place during the IIFF there were two VIP – network events with over 30 High Net Worth Individuals attending, a perfect place for creating new connections, meeting interesting people and hear of future developments in the film industry.

Next year’s edition of the International Innovation and Film Festival will take place from 6th of March to 10th of March 2020.