Our story

Astra Film Festival – A brief history

is a documentary film festival launched in 1993 in Sibiu, Astra Film Festival (AFF) as an innovative cultural initiative amidst the turbulent context of the major changes sweeping through Romania after 1989. Its development? The event’s survival over time is a story of resilience in its own right, based on a belief in the transformative power of documentary cinema and of dialogue, of knowledge, and of the cultural event itself. With over three decades of uninterrupted existence, the festival has evolved from a platform for visual anthropological exploration into a complex cultural phenomenon, dedicated to auteur documentary film and to debating the major themes of the contemporary world.

Discover the extraordinary story of the creation and development of Astra Film Festival, by its founding director Dumitru Budrala and his team over the first 20 years – the journey taken to become the home of the documentary in Romania and a landmark event in the cinematic landscape of Central and Eastern Europe. In the anniversary video below.

Astra Film Festival – a place celebrating the power and artistry of documentary cinema

For over three decades, the festival has presented an annual selection of around 100 international productions in competitive and thematic sections. The festival’s development has run parallel to the global rise in appetite for creative documentary cinema capable of surprising, evoking and exposing on the big screen the complexity and unspoken urgencies of human existence in the 21st century.

Year after year, both professionals and the general public are delighted by the infinite possibilities offered by the language of documentary cinema,  the diversity of approach and the way reality is captured through the films and the presence of contemporary filmmakers as well as the great classics attending the festival, such as Frederick Wiseman, John Marshall, David MacDougall, Kim Longinoto, Bob Connolly, Lucian Castaing-Taylor&Verena Paravel, Cristi Puiu and Wang Bing.

The festival is an annual gathering of the documentary filmmaking community, including industry professionals (DokTank), and the go-to destination for documentary film students across Europe (DocStudentHub) to screen their student films and take part in an informal learning experience during the festival. Astra Film Festival is part of the European documentary film festivals, whose award-winning films are eligible for nomination for the European Oscar organised by the European Film Academy (European Film Awards).

Cinema that reflects reality, transforming communities and opening up new worlds

The event proved to be appealing due to its ability to transform the cinema screen into a lucid mirror of society. Each film in the selection evokes the stories of our contemporaries. And through the post-screening discussions, as well as through Doctalk-style panel discussions, Astra Film Festival has become a cultural hub, a necessary space to observe, relive, reflect upon and dissect the burdensome aspects of human existence amidst the maelstrom of constraints in contemporary societies.

Astra Film Junior

It is a major film education event attended by tens of thousands of school pupils over five days.

The programme consists of

· Screenings of documentaries about children, selected for three age groups, followed by an open discussion with the audience

· A comic strip competition for primary school pupils, inspired by the film they have watched

· documentary film-making workshops,

· media and civic education workshops

The festival’s name is well known and enthusiastically chanted by the pupils, and pupils from all schools in Sibiu are keen to take part; year after year, there is an exemplary level of commitment to overcoming transport difficulties so that pupils from dozens of villages in Sibiu County or from other counties can attend.

Astra Film Junior began as a special film screening event for pupils in 2009 as part of Astra Film Festival; today it has become a festival in its own right, attended by over half a million pupils from Sibiu County and across the country.

Thanks to its uninterrupted activity spanning over three decades, Astra Film holds an archive of tens of thousands of documentary films from around the world produced over these three decades, as well as a unique catalogue of all Romanian documentaries produced from 1990 to the present day.