Held 15th to 17th November 2024

Co-Directors: Anne Patterson and Katalin Lanczi

The Theme of this festival was Journey

In our contemporary culture ‘journey’ seems to make regular appearances as a shallow cliché but it does evince concepts deeply rooted in human consciousness and human prehistory, ancestral themes now surfacing as currency in popular culture. Journey evokes a multiplicity of associations that offer a broad canvas for the exploration of its representation in film from literal road movies and tales of migration to more interior voyages into the mind.

The etymology of ‘journey’ is originally from the Latin ‘diurnus’ / ‘diurnum’ meaning ‘daily portion,’ becoming ‘journée’ in French and arriving in Middle English as ‘journey.’ It is a concept deeply rooted in the human psyche and underpins universal narratives such as the ‘hero’s journey’ from ancient mythology to the latest video games. A psychoanalyst’s daily work is structured around each patient’s internal journey. Film makers, whose creative process, itself a journey, produce a genre that is par excellence the portrayal of their characters’ journey through time, space, relationships, between countries and cultures. The 12th European Psychoanalytic Film festival honoured the tradition of bringing together film makers and psychoanalysts to discuss the resonance between our different but overlapping journeys. 

Programme

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Held 4th to 6th November 2022

New Co-Directors: Katalin Lanczi and Anne Patterson

The last two years prior seemed to have unleashed a veritable Pandora’s Box of disasters upon us: Brexit, Covid, the mounting evidence of climate catastrophe and the war in Ukraine. The last item left in Pandora’s Box, according to Greek mythology, was Hope. Hope can represent the capacity to maintain or regain a sense of a sustainable future both psychically and in the wider world, that is in the internal and the external world. Thus, hope can represent the life drive and our relationship with the good object. Conversely, it can be a defence against unbearable reality and loss when it is an expression of the manic defence. The opening evening at the 11th EPFF introduced one of the most outstanding film directors of our time, Agnieszka Holland, our new Honorary President, whose work attests to both hope and despair.  

Programme from the 11th Film Festival

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Held 31st October to 3rd November 2019

Director: Andrea Sabbadini

The End | Each end is a new beginning

The theme of The End hoped to give those attending thought-provoking opportunities to review different kinds of endings in movies – happy ends, open ends, ambiguous ends, unexpected ends – and to explore the criteria used by screenwriters and directors in order to decide how to end their works.

Incidentally, films used to have the words The End on their last frames (as if spectators would not otherwise be aware that it was about time for them to get up and leave the cinema!), though providing such redundant information is no longer fashionable nowadays.

Another reason why the theme of this Festival is relevant to us is because, since the early days of psychoanalysis, there has always been an interest in how to end our open-ended form of therapy - and when, and why, and who should decide about it. We hope that in our discussions about the films to be screened at epff10 links could be made between the way their makers have chosen to end them and the way we psychoanalysts end our work with patients.

‘A flower that blossoms only for a single night does not seem to us on that account less lovely’, Freud wrote in his article On transience. ‘Nor can I understand any better why the beauty and perfection of a work of art or of an intellectual achievement should lose its worth because of its temporal limitation’ (1916, Standard Edition Vol. 14, p. 306).

All things are destined to come to an end: flowers, stone buildings, books, festivals, films… and our own lives. But it could also be claimed that nothing ever ends and that, instead, all undergoes transformation. Maybe a movie, then, will be the ‘day residue’ for a dream, or remain with us in the shape of an indelible memory, or become the opportunity to start a fascinating conversation with a stranger.

Held 2nd to 5th November 2017 at Bafta

Theme Interiors/Exteriors

These apparently opposed territories can at times harmoniously coexist, while at others they clash with each other in painful, disturbing or, possibly, transformative ways. This idea is highly pertinent to both cinema and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is at its very core about how we experience within us what is happening in the world outside. Conversely, it also investigates how the roles we assume in external reality – particularly in relationships – are shaped and affected by our inner worlds. Cinema, too, has always explored ideas around relatedness and disconnection; surfaces and depths; visible images and what lies behind them; our deep inner worlds and the vast, sometimes unfathomable world beyond us.

Watch the trailer for the 9th EPFF below: