The festival is held with resources from Complementary Law No. 195/2022, Paulo Gustavo Law, and presented by the Ministry of Culture. Funding from Iecine, Pro-Cultura, and the Culture Department of the State of Rio Grande do Sul.
The event will take place from February 14-23, with free admission
Starting on October 23, Cine Esquema Novo — Brazilian Audiovisual Art is open for applications for the Brazil Competitive Exhibition. Applicants should access the registration form and regulation through this link until December 2. The festival accepts works completed from January 1, 2022, not previously registered in the festival and not yet premiered on the commercial cinema circuit, works made in Brazil by Brazilians or foreigners, or works abroad by Brazilians. This event is held with resources from Complementary Law 195/2022, Paulo Gustavo Law, presented by the Ministry of Culture and financed by Iecine, Pro-Cultura and the Department of Culture of the State of Rio Grande do Sul.
Cine Esquema Novo’s 15th edition will take place from February 14-23, 2025, including screenings in cinemas and exhibition spaces, debates, seminars, and workshops. Admission is free for all activities. The program will be held at Cinemateca Capitólio, Goethe-Institut Porto Alegre, Cinemateca Paulo Amorim, MAC RS — Contemporary Art Museum of RS, Casa Baka, and rooms of Casa de Cultura Mário Quintana. The selected entries compete against each other, regardless of duration and format. “CEN is an event that privileges all audiovisual content, wherever possible. The selected works for the Brazil Competitive Exhibition may be shown in cinemas, galleries or other spaces proposed by artists and the festival curators,” say CEN organizers Jaqueline Beltrame and Ramiro Azevedo. In addition to Jaqueline and Ramiro, Kamyla Belli and visual artist Dirnei Prates are part of the curatorial team.
Throughout its 14 editions, CEN reached more than 83,500 people (on-site and online) and showed more than 1,200 works. With a democratic and plural program, the shows reflect and legitimize the diversity of Brazil’s audiovisual production, giving voice mainly to filmmakers and visual artists who use audiovisual as a tool for experimenting with languages while addressing themes that reflect contemporary issues, opening new paths for the works’ circulation and filmographies development.
The event will carry on this format after the success of the Artist’s Notebook, launched in 2021. The Artist’s Notebook is an online environment built in partnership with each selected artist. It will be available on the CEN’s website, on a webpage dedicated to the artists’ creative universe, so that they may share with the public extra materials related to the selected work, biography, references, and interviews conducted by the event’s team. “Cine Esquema Novo has always valued and diligently built, in each past edition, the relationship between movies in sessions and how they relate to each other within the program—and how different spaces can exhibit audiovisual content. The Artist’s Notebooks offer another connection between the works and the public, which can deepen their experience,” reveal the curators.
The Outros Esquemas Exhibition, which was part of the 2019 and 2021 editions, remains on the program. “This is a non-competitive show that became part of the CEN program to provide another space for movies that catch our eyes, provoke and move us but that for some other reason end up not fitting into the curatorial proposal of the Brazil Competitive Exhibition,” say the curators. The festival will invite the movies selected for the Outros Esquemas Exhibition to participate.
The Official Jury will be responsible for choosing, among the works selected for the Competitive Exhibition, the Grand Prize of the 15th Cine Esquema Novo and 5 Special Jury Prizes (the Official Jury may award up to 5 prizes, freely, among all the works competing).
Luiz Roque is the guest artist
Artist born in Cachoeira do Sul (RS) and living in São Paulo, Luiz Roque is one of the five artists who represented Brazil in the main exhibition of the 2022 Venice Art Biennale. “Attracted by the power of image and, in particular, by sensations that stem from the sense of vision, Luiz Roque’s work crosses different territories, such as the genre of science fiction, the legacy of Modernism, pop-culture and queer bio-politics, in order to understand the propose ingenious and visually sensual narratives. The plasticity of the allegories he uses in his films takes us through the current conflict between technological advancement and contemporary micro and macro power relations. Roque’s works inhabit a space between cinema, art and critical theory, all within the scope of a political dispute that is both real and imaginary. Furthermore, his works comment on the dissociative conditions of being between the latency of life and respective bureaucratic definitions. In this sense, his works combine the splendor of science fiction—as a device for disseminating hypotheses—with resources from the language of cinema to present us with scenarios of social tension and complex public debates.” (Originally published at Mendes Wood Gallery’s website, which represents the artist).
His recent solo shows have been held at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2024); PROA21, Buenos Aires (2022); Visual Arts Center, Austin (2021); Pivô, São Paulo (2020); CAC Passarelle, Brest (2020); Screens Series, New Museum, New York (2019); Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói (MAC), Niterói (2018). Additionally, Roque has taken part in group exhibitions at the 12th Gothenburg Biennale (2023), the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), the 32nd São Paulo Biennale (2016) and in institutions such as PORTIKUS, MASP, MoMa-Ps1, Warsaw Museum of Modern Art and Kunsthalle Vienna.
Established in Porto Alegre in 2003, CEN has held, in addition to competitive shows, several programs with essential productions in the history of independent cinema, video art, artist cinema, and expanded cinema, as well as workshops, debates, and seminars, fostering the formation of an audiovisual art audience, encouraging new productions, and building a reference space, enhancing exchanges between filmmakers, audiences, and institutions. “In addition to reflecting on the audiovisual production, seeking to break down aesthetic and format barriers, it is a great achievement to see CEN as an event for audience formation and development of projects and directors,” said the festival’s creators. Throughout 14 editions, there were numerous partnerships with other festivals, events, and institutions, such as San Sebastián Festival (Spain), Cine Humberto Mauro (Brazil), Goethe-Institut Porto Alegre (Brazil), Arsenal Institut (Germany), Semana dos Realizadores (Brazil), Mercosul Biennial (Brazil), Bafici (Argentina), Fuso Lisboa, and Temp d’Images (Portugal), among others.
Cine Esquema Novo is an ACENDI – Associação Cine Esquema Novo de Desenvolvimento da Imagem initiative. This project is funded by resources from Complementary Law No. 195/2022, Paulo Gustavo Law, and presented by the Ministry of Culture. Funded by Iecine, Pró-Cultura, and the Department of Culture of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, with support from Cinemateca Capitólio, Goethe Institut Porto Alegre, Cinemateca Paulo Amorim, Galeria Sotero Cosme, MACRS, Casa de Cultura Mario Quintana, and Casa Baka. For more information, please visit www.cineesquemanovo.org | www.facebook.com/cineesquemanovocen | @cine_esquema_novo