The Amandus Film Festival will be split into three parts in 2021, including a new event solely focused on film students and young indie filmmakers.
The spreading of the corona virus drastically changed how the festival was organized in 2020. In just three weeks we had to change all our plans and make an online festival. Despite the short time of planning, the festival was a success, and all the new knowledge we gathered will be valuable for the coming year.
As the pandemic will still affect our daily lives for quite a while, we are quite sure we cannot make a completely normal festival in March next spring. Instead we are making several events, including one festival solely dedicated to film students and young independent filmmakers under 26.
A physical and online festival for Scandinavian youth
From March 24-27 we will organize the classic Amandus Festival, a physical festival for youth filmmakers under 20. This will be a festival first and foremost for nominated filmmakers, in addition to a few groups from some schools.
For everyone who is not able to join in Lillehammer, we will build on our experiences with a digital festival, and offer a new edition of Amandus ONLINE. This online festival will also have content towards a broader, Scandinavian audience.
A new student and indie film festival
The student film competition has been an important part of the Amandus festival since 2017, and next year we will give it an even bigger place, with its own festival. Together with the indie category previously known as Amandus OPEN, a brand new competition and festival will be held in the early autumn (probably late September) in 2021.
This will be a celebration of young filmmaking and educational filmmaking from all over the Nordic countries (and beyond??).
This also affect the film submission for the competitions. The two categories known as Amandus STUDENT and Amandus OPEN are combined to one (though we will still differentiate between student films and indie films), and the deadline is moved all the way to June 20. The submission form is open and you are welcome to submit your film now.
We cross our fingers for more open borders and a more or less virus free world after the coming summer, and hope to see many filmmakers from all over the Nordic countries in Norway for this festival.
More information about place, time and content will be announced later.