Bucharest International Dance Film Festival: Open Call 2025

About the Open Call

The 11th edition of the Bucharest International Dance Film Festival (BIDFF), themed 'Keep Calm and Keep On Moving', invites filmmakers, dance artists, animators, visual artists, and digital art makers to submit short films and VR experiences for its International Short Film Competition. The festival aims to create a dialogue space around contemporary society's emotional crisis, capturing resilience through movement as a transformative force. BIDFF is a platform for films using movement as primary language or the body as main subject, encouraging syncretism between movement and diverse forms of cinema, from traditional to experimental and hybrid works. Beyond film screenings, BIDFF includes VR showcases, lectures, public presentations, and workshops. The festival takes place annually in September across multiple locations in Bucharest, Romania, engaging dancers, choreographers, visual artists, directors, VR creators, theoreticians, and producers in over 20 events.

What is Offered

Money awards for Best International Film (1000 Euros) and Jury Prize (500 Euros). Free entry to all the events of the festival, excluding workshops that require a previous application.

Requirements

The competitional section is dedicated to short films only. The board will take into consideration fiction, documentary and animation films that either use movement to explore an idea or speak about issues related to the body and the world of dance and performance. We also highly encourage you to apply if you have a short film that explores the future of art, questioning issues related to the ethics of collaboration, communication, and co-existence. For the first time, BIDFF is also looking for VR experiences that use movement as their main language or the body as their main subject. Short dance films produced in the last two years that do not exceed 20 minutes in length and have a minimum quality of Full HD (1080p), that can be either live action or animation in genres of fiction, documentary or experimental. Not looking for: Music videos, trailers or recordings of performances, films already submitted to previous editions of BIDFF, one-minute films, commercials.

How to Apply

Submissions are open from May 12, with deadlines on June 22 (regular) and July 12 (late). Directors may submit a maximum of two films via FilmFreeway. Applicants should check category-specific fees before submitting and will be notified of outcomes by August 1, 2025.