Fotogenia Festival is a Film Poetry & Divergent Narratives Festival held in Mexico City, the first one of its kind to celebrate not only experimental cinema but also filmpoetry, videoart, expanded cinema and divergent narratives; that means to celebrate cinema itself, experimentation with its nature, formats, genres, narrative and all the freedom to explore the audiovisual image without restriction. It joins the Festivals of this type around the world such as the Film & Video Poetry Symposium that takes place in Moscow, Los Angeles and New York; Rencontres Internationales held in Paris and Berlin; ZEBRA Poetryfilm Festival that takes place in Berlin and Le FIFA, International Festival in Film & Arts held in Montreal, Canada.

It is a term proposed by the French filmmaker Louis Delluc and later taken up by the also French filmmaker Jean Epstein to talk about the nature of expression of cinema. In its beginnings, the cinema was not a machine for telling stories; in fact, it was not known whether it was a scientific, artistic, entertainment, amusement or exploration invention. No one had any idea what to use it for! For their part, the avant-garde artists used it, surprised that it captured movement, light, space and time, something that was a more primitive attitude on the subject of cinema. PHOTOGENY (FOTOGENIA) is an open term that refers to the quality that makes cinema... CINEMA! This signifies the power that cinema has to transform the everyday into something special... For Delluc it was movement, for Epstein it was space, for Tarkovsky it was time. And for you? What do you think makes cinema? Finding the answer together is the reason for this Festival and in this way, we can talk about a new and distinctive modern way of thinking, making and watching cinema. PHOTOGENIA = PHOTO (light) + GENIA (genius, ingenuity)

It is a term that we take from Pier Paolo Pasollini to refer to the nature of cinema (a term that has been explored over time by various authors and in different ways), for him, cinema can move away from narrative of language to approach the expression of thought; just as the cinema thinks in images and does not have a dictionary and rules of syntax like literature, these images that come from reality can approach dreams, memory, thought. For his part, Tarkovsky also believed that cinema can move away from the sequential mathematical logic of narrative that it drew from literature, since this reduces the possibilities of expression of cinema; therefore, for him, it is more fertile to approach a poetic logic, a logic of thought that does not flow linearly, through which one can explore with more creativity, with more freedom and with more connection between individuals, the medium possibilities. Filmpoetry is UNRESTRICTED CREATION OF THE AUDIOVISUAL IMAGE. Actually THERE ARE NO RULES, THEY ARE IMAGES THAT EVOKE OUR THOUGHT.

It is a term proposed by the FOTOGENIA FESTIVAL to name all those works whose proposal moves away from the Classic Hollywood Narrative Model, to build, re-build and explore freedom in the concatenation of images and sounds, which is similar to the way in which our thinking is related.

They are unlimited, but among those that represent this exploration with the cinematographic medium, we point out a few: -Louis Delluc - Germain Dulac - Jean Epstein - Jean Cocteau - Maya Deren - Pier Paolo Pasolini - Andrei Tarkovsky - Stanley Brakhage - Jan Švankmajer - Juan Carlos Rulfo - Carlos Reygadas and many, many more...

If you are an audiovisual producer interested in provoking the cinematographic image by exploring the frontiers and limits of its own narrative, genres, media and exhibition formats, to dialogue with the viewer in new and critical ways that generate a confrontation between reality and the cinematographic phenomenon, this is your place of exposure. If your work does not fit into the regular Film Festivals, register it in this call, you have nothing to lose and instead you can belong to our experimental community and also win the DELLUC AVANT-GARDE AWARD!!