17th Balkans Beyond Borders Short Film Festival - Shift Your Gaze to the Unseen

Balkans Beyond Borders Short Film Festival is an annual thematic short-film festival that takes place in a different European city every year with a special focus in South-Eastern Europe, thus maximizing its regional impact on promoting the Balkan culture and European values. It engages new audiences and promotes inter-Balkan cooperation creating a hub for productive networking among the region’s community of filmmakers, art professionals, stakeholders, cultural organizations and partners. The hosting city for the 17th edition will be Athens, Greece offering a space of discovery of who we are in the Balkans for all generations and lived experiences, a networking hub for balkan festivals and a multithematic event.This year’s edition, under the theme ‘Shift Your Gaze to the Unseen’, intends to explore the architecture of the gaze, sides that often go unnoticed remaining outside the frame. Our memories, experiences, and social environments influence what and how we see, while dominant narratives and structures of power determine which realities become visible and which are pushed to the margins. The festival invites filmmakers to turn their attention toward the unseen. Sometimes the most important stories are not hidden; they simply lie beyond the frames through which we have learned to look. Therefore, we welcome films that question the limits of visibility and challenge dominant ways of seeing, by revealing what has been ignored, silenced, or forgotten.The festival gives the opportunity to the filmmakers to be awarded for the BBB Best Film Award (monetary prize), BBB First Entry Award (in kind) & BBB Audience Award (monetary), three Special Mentions. For the second consecutive year, Balkans Beyond Borders continues to explore the creative possibilities of Artificial Intelligence in filmmaking giving the BBB Creative AI Award (in kind). The 17th edition introduces the BBB Gen Alpha Award (in kind) inviting filmmakers to bring the magic of cinematic storytelling to the Gen A (4-15 y.o.).