ÉDITO

This year marks the 40th edition of the Brest European Short Film Festival! And while this anniversary might suggest a certain crisis, dare we say “the forties crisis,” this is not the case. Like its poster, the Brest Festival looks to the future with the same optimism as those who created it!

At 40 years old, it has every reason to be proud of its history, yet the Festival refuses to get stuck in the “it was better before” mindset. Before what? The invasion of Ukraine? Covid? The emergence of social media? The introduction of the euro?
The Y2K bug? The solar eclipse? The 1998 World Cup? The Maastricht Treaty? The invention of Minitel? Or even before digital? Before video, in the good old days of film? By showing films from across the continent, the Brest Festival has been a privileged witness to all the historical upheavals that have shaped today’s Europe in all its complexity, uniqueness, and above all, beauty.

Cinema survives all crises; better still, it enables us to get through them. So this anniversary is above all an opportunity for the Festival to reaffirm its support for young filmmakers as artists who enable us to experience history.

For its 40th edition, the Brest European Short Film Festival invites you to a week of discovering the talents of yesterday and tomorrow, with competitions, off-program events, and retrospective screenings.