ABOUT THE FESTIVAL

The ELBE DOCK International Film Festival is a competitive showcase of the best short films (fiction, animation, documentary and experimental) from Central Europe. The 17th Pavel Koutecký Award is closely linked to the festival and will be awarded, as before, to the best Czech documentary first or second film by a filmmaker in both the feature and short film sections. The competition programme will be complemented by a selection of the best European feature debuts and other strange and less strange accompanying programme. This year's theme is "AIAI", i.e. humans and their connection with artificial intelligence in audiovisual art. The visual identity was created with the help of endless conversations with the AI chat tool Chat GPT, with whom we created a brief for the AI graphic tool Midjurney, in which we created dozens of outputs that we didn't use. The theme of visual identity thus becomes the human itself, its assignment and learning a new AI language.

Connecting Czech and German culture and promoting Central European dialogue in the field of audiovisual production is one of the main goals of the festival. Setting ELBE DOCK in the German Saxony, the Czech Ústí nad Labem region and Prague is intended to stimulate the development of cultural infrastructure and film audiences in a border industrial area that has long been neglected in this respect. The partnership with Germany brings another dimension of international cooperation to the festival, which has the potential to mutually inspire cultural events in both regions in the long term.