American Independent Film Festival returns for the second part of its 7th edition between June 23 – 25. The screenings and special events will take place at the Elvire Popesco Cinema and Roaba de Cultura (Herastrau Park) in Bucharest.

The public will have the chance to see two of this summer’s most anticipated films: Asteroid City (dir. Wes Anderson) and Tár (dir. Todd Field), as well as to revisit popular films such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s (dir. Blake Edwards), Hail, Caesar! (dir. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen), Rocketman (dir. Dexter Fletcher), and Romance & Cigarettes (dir. John Turturro) – the screening will be followed by a Q&A with American actress Mary-Louise Parker, the special guest of the festival.

The film program is completed by two important talks. The public is invited on Friday, June 23, at 8:00 pm at Roaba de Cultura to participate in a debate about Creativity in the age of ChatGPT, an event organized in collaboration with Films in Frame.

The talk will be moderated by Flavia Dima (film critic, curator, and translator), and the panel guests include:

1/ Alina Manolache (filmmaker)

2/ Irina Trocan (Assistant Professor, Film Faculty, UNATC Bucharest; Coordinator & Redactor, Acoperișul de Sticlă)

3/ Mihai Grecu (multimedia artist, film director, and producer)

4/ Liviu P. Dinu (Professor, Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, Computer Science Department, University of Bucharest; Director, Human Language Technologies Research Center)

5/ Marius Leordeanu (Professor, University “Politehnica” of Bucharest; Senior Researcher, Institute of Mathematics “Simion Stoilow”, the Romanian Academy).

Entry is free to the event.

ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot created by OpenAI, is already widely used for text generation and information retrieval in various domains. The panelists, along with the audience attending the debate, will analyze the role of artificial intelligence in creative processes and seek to answer the question, “Is creativity threatened by artificial intelligence, and how do artists relate to new technologies?”.

On Saturday, June 24, at 8:00 pm, another debate will take place at Roaba de Cultura: Open Talk with Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten, about writing original screenplays in today’s European film industry. Screenwriter and script consultant Marietta von Hausswolff von Baumgarten (Sundance Labs, Torino Film Lab, Biennale College Venice) is one of the mentors of this year’s WRITE A SCREENPLAY FOR… screenwriting contest. The talk will be moderated by screenwriter and director Iulia Rugină.

For more details and the complete festival program, check out the AIFF website.

Melissa Antonescu

Writer, photographer and videographer. For Films in Frame she writes news about the latest happenings in the film world and brings to the readers' attention the productions that can be seen at the cinema. When she's not writing articles, she's photographing people in a small studio or searching for new cake recipes.