This year's winner has created over several decades a unique meeting place for students, researchers, schoolchildren and other residents of Bergen. The winner is able to create a space for excitement, wonder, insight and debate on current research topics through their powerful and socially relevant program year after year. The winner also expressed a unique desire to create good collaborative spaces that contribute to making university research available to the public, not least to schoolchildren and future students.
The Bergen International Film Festival has been organized annually since 2000. The Bergen Film Festival has an extensive program of both feature films and documentaries, and also boasts the country's largest film screening for school students. With visitor numbers reaching around 50,000 in recent years, BIFF has established itself as the largest film festival in Norway.
School performances at BIFF attract approx. 25,000 children and young people go to cinemas every year. The school program contributes to an early encounter between young people, researchers and researchers, which can inspire future career choices. Researchers from UiB also contribute to educational materials that are distributed to schools before the festival, and we believe this is a good way to make research at UiB visible to young people.
BIFF's active contribution to student culture is crucial. 33% of BIFF's audience are students. Students also make up a large percentage of the volunteer effort. In other words, the festival is an important meeting place where connections and friendships are made, especially among international students in Bergen. BIFF regularly supports film screenings at Det Akademiske Kvarter in cooperation with the Bergen Film Club. UiB's media students gain valuable training through BIFF-TV, where they receive TV production training, conduct interviews with guests and audiences, and publish films on the festival's website.
Since 2014, BIFF has been an important platform for disseminating research, particularly through the 'Gulluglen' research documentary series, where each year UiB faculty select the best documentary of the year. Academics at the University of Bahrain are also represented on the judging panel of the human rights program “Checkpoints”. This program has a long tradition of connecting UiB researchers with visiting guests for panel discussions.
BIFF is not just a festival that takes place only during the fall week. BIFF films are screened almost weekly throughout the year at the Bergen Cinema and at the UiB, often with introductions by UiB staff. BIFF's Cine Latino Festival, which showcases Latin American films that are not regularly screened in Norway, is a close collaboration with the Department of Foreign Languages, the Department of Policy and Management and the Center for Law and Social Transformation at UiB.
Several other research societies have collaborated with the festival on thematic screenings of films and subsequent panel discussions: Oplev Marienholmen, Bergen School of Global Studies, Skivforsk, and Skift Arkiv are some examples.
BIFF facilitates a unique communication collaboration with the University of Bergen. It is a cooperation for mutual development and yields results that benefit both the institutions themselves and the general public.
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