Pärnu Film and Video Festival 2010

The aim of the Pärnu Film and Video Festival – FIDEOFESTIVAL has been to map the Estonian audiovisual landscape (film, video art, documentary anthropology, and virtual media) and offer insights into what happens in the rest of the world on a non-commercial experimental level.

The concept that launched the Pärnu Film and Video Festival in the 1990s was to lose the defined and institutional borders between film and video art, narrative and conceptualism, professionals and profane ones, artists and cinema freaks. This energetic pluralism on a small territory - refuting and clearing out hierarchies, defining common grounds or confrontation - was a new thing in Estonia at the time and was met with incredible reactions, when viewed in retrospect. A whole new concept was formed for this purpose - the 'fideo festival'.

Once titled as the film event of barbarians, the alternative festival has by now successfully met expectations with the help of the information society. What comes next? Video art has risen from the marginal status of a few experimentalists and enthusiasts into the mainstream and the global technological evolution has been overwhelming. Since the beginning of the 1990s, when there was only a handful of VHS cameras in Estonia and it took months, not to mention a small fortune, to book an editing session, things have moved on and we have reached an audiovisual frenzy - now everyone has become the director, cameraman and producer of their home cinema and don't need anything aside from a mobile phone and the YouTube.

What is video art after video art? This gone be found out in Pärnu Fideofestival.

This year theme is Fideosupermarket. Fideofestival takes over free commercial boxes in Port Artur Shopping Center and fills them with AV-installations. Borders between underground and commercial, art and money, icons and global market hyper brain behind mass culture, free soul and market monkey – who leads who in this crazy interesting over warming free market.

Tons of videos, fideoshop rental, international conference “Prize of Good Art” and even more.