4 festival days, 15 films of which 13 have their national premiere, 2 Academy Awards submissions, 5 documentaries and one docufiction and 2 Romanian films, all from 17 different countries. This is how the fourth edition of HipTrip Film Festival will look like.

In 2017 we continue on last year’s path, when we focused on films which had their national premiere and had been part of important festivals. Whether there are documentaries or fictional films, the selected productions present us destinations full of personality using a brave and innovative film language. The main section of the festival, called Focus, is dedicated to the Asian continent which is inherently heterogeneous and cinematographically rich, while the Explorers section will be the same as in previous years, with films for those who venture on less wandered paths. To these well-known sections we added a brand new section called Etno Trip, dedicated to the people that are behind the destinations, and a section for children and teenagers, called Hip Kids. – Cătălin Olaru, Artistic manager

Singapore’s submission to the Academy Awards, Pop Aye, will open this year’s edition of HipTrip. The film is produced by Singapore and Thailand and directed by Kirsten Tan. It received the Special Mention of the Jury for Screenplay at Sundance 2017, and earlier this month it won the Golden Eye at Zurich Film Festival. The film tells the story of Thana, an architect who feels that his career is coming to an end. One day, on a chance encounter, he bumps into his long-lost elephant Pop Aye. Excited, he buys Pop Aye and they go on a journey across Thailand, in search of the farm where they grew up together.

The festival also has a special guest. Director Frédéric Favre will present in Bucharest some of his documentaries, part of the Explorers section. These also include Encordés, a film which presents a journey into three ski mountaineers’ preparation for the hardest race across the Swiss Alps called Patrouille des Glaciers. Explorers section aims to inspire and encourage the public to transform from dreamers into travelers.

For those passionate about travel and cinema, Romanian Film Development recommends:

• The Island and the Whales (dir. Mike Day) is a documentary about the whale hunters of the Faroe Islands who believe that hunting is vital to their way of life. But their opinion is about to change when they find out about the environmental changes caused by marine pollution.
• La pas pe litoral is the expedition film made by the cinematographer Vlad Petri and the journalist Vlad Ursulean in 2015 when they took their backpacks and started out on foot from Sulina to Vama Veche, to see ‘how the earth meets the sea, the line that attracts and inspires people, helping them to find themselves or get drunk’.
• Soul on a String (dir. Zhang Yang) – winner of Best Cinematography at Shanghai International Film Festival; the film addresses the theme of Tibetan culture.

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To find out more about HipTrip, check out the festival’s website and Facebook page.

HipTrip is the festival which will make you go out of the cinema and take a plane to a precise destination. The tickets can be purchased on Eventbook. See you there!

Romina Banu

Photographer and editor; she co-founded Dissolved Magazine together with Melissa. For Films in Frame she gathers film and TV series recommendations for lazy weekends and she writes about interesting projects from the film industry. Other than that, she likes traveling, chilling with her cats and sleeping.