Hello, Beijing! Here we come. After the success of 2015’s Beyond Frozen Point Film Festival, we are back again with new stories from the North! For the 2016 Beyond Frozen Film Festival, our focus is on CHANGE responding to the urgent global issue of CLIMATE CHANGE. Our films come from the Arctic Barents Region, or the High North. In recent years, many Arctic related issues, such as the rich natural resources, the northwest traffic route together with the threat of Climate Change have brought many visible changes in the region. But the changes are not just taking place on the wild landscape here. The youth are entering the adulthood, the grownups are facing existential crisis, even the ideal Nordic welfare society is facing challenges. These are the changes that our films are about. From the Arctic region, the front-row seat of experiencing climate change, our films offer different perspectives of viewing these changes. 

Starting from the 29th October to the 6th November, our films will be screened in the Beijing 9 Theater FIRST Youth Cinema. Except for the complete program from this year’s Beyond Frozen Point Film Festival, we have also selected highlights from our previous festival for the Beijing audience. Through our collaboration with the North Polar Region’s largest film festival, the TromsøInternational Film Festival, we are very proud to bring these films from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Greenland. 

For the feature films, we have brought the critic acclaimed Swedish film Turist (Force Majeure) from 2014 and this year’s Cannes Film Festival winning film Rams from Iceland. The Norwegian film The Wave represented Norway competing for the Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards. The Swedish artists duo Bigert and Bergström exam the human desire to control the weather through their mixed art/documentary film The Weather War. From Norway, we also brought the multiple prize-winning film Brothers, a film that is praised as “a lyric depiction of the childhood”. 6 short film sections brought together the best shorts from our festival offer different angles to enter the inner world of the Northern land. Our Chinese film section contains more experimental short films and two feature/documentary films dealing with transformation of environment and people living in this transformation. Finally we are proud to present our tribute to the master Swedish director Roy Andersson by showing his first feature film A Swedish Love Story. Through the story of “the youngest lovers in the world film history”, Andersson depicted also the generation of the parents whose situation reflected the social turmoil of the 1960s in Western society. 

Although we are living in a digital internet-connected world today, nevertheless, some of these films have physically travelled long way and gone through various international logistics to arrive here so that you can see them on big screens. It reminds us that communication is a many-sided link that brings people and ideas together. When the smog is turning too unbearable outside, where would be a better place to spend a good time in the darkness of a cinema and dream away to places so far away from us? The extreme harshness of cold winter in the north, the mysterious midnight sunlight on the Polar region and most importantly the everyday triviality and emotional upheaval of the people living on this land create the dramatic of the films. We hope you would come to see them as they have travelled long way to come to meet you.

All films will be shown with English and Chinese subtitles.

Click the images below to see the full schedule.