Colombia. The Cartagena de Indias International Film Festival Corporation, FICCI, has appointed Ansgar Vogt as the new Artistic Director after having been linked to the festival since 2018. Vogt assumes the position for the 63rd edition that will be held from April 16 to 21, 2024 and continues with the management carried out by Felipe Aljure during the last 5 years.
"Ansgar has been a fundamental part of this festival since Felipe Aljure summoned us to his artistic direction and today that this position is assumed by Ansgar, his particular look on cinema and those who do it will be the gravitational force that attracts us to a FICCI 63 in 2024", says the General Director of the Festival, Alessandro Basile.
Since 2018, Ansgar Vogt is part of the team of the Cartagena de Indias International Film Festival - FICCI, and in 2020 he assumed the position of Head of Programming. He previously worked as a programmer in the Forum section of the Berlin International Film Festival for 15 years. Since then he has been a member of various juries of film festivals worldwide. He has been a producer, content developer and screenwriter for German film and television production companies. Between 2021 and 2022 he worked as a Consultant and Project Manager at DW Akademie Film Development Fund, Germany, operating in Tanzania, Ethiopia and Uganda. For many years he was a reading consultant for the Balkan Development Fund/Thessaloniki IFF and the German broadcaster ZDF. In 2007, he taught film analysis and script development at SungKyunKwan University, as a fellow of the German Academic Exchange Service, DAAD.
"I started as an international consultant at FICCI in 2018 after meeting Felipe Aljure in Brazil. In 2019, I was in Cartagena for the first time at the Festival and also met the curatorial committee - and therefore also Alessandro Basile. A year later, I was appointed Head of Programming. Together with Felipe, the team of curators and David Montenegro as programming coordinator of FICCI, we prepared an excellent edition... until the pandemic hit. All the work seemed in vain at first, but it was the beginning of something new, which is why we created the special edition FICCI Interruptus, which gave the festival a completely new impulse and helped us consolidate the next edition in 2022. Alessandro was also always there, calmly and with an overall vision: accessible, resilient, consultable. And then came the offer to take on the artistic direction: a great responsibility and a huge challenge," says Ansgar about his appointment as artistic director.
About the new artistic direction Basile adds: "I learned a lot from him in the years that as Chief Curator he guided the selections of past festivals and I continue to learn today that we are both in different positions but with the same appreciation and respect for his unique way of understanding the twists and turns of cinematographic storytelling worldwide."
Ansgar is a graduate of New York University's Tisch School of the Arts with a Masters in Performance Studies, he also studied Theatre and Film at the Humboldt University of Berlin and Drama and Theatre Arts at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
For Vogt "An artistic director is only as good as the festival team. I think we are not only a very good team, but also a special team. Alessandro Basile is Mr. Cartagena, with years of experience in festivals and production. Alessandro's indispensable local connection is also crucial. An international festival must always be anchored in the local, integrate its local roots into the international, and vice versa: bring together the international and the local. This interaction is essential. Because a festival like FICCI must look far beyond its own horizons, but without visible local connections it would be faceless. And FICCI has a face. A face in Cartagena".
Another novelty of the 63rd edition is the appointment of David Montenegro as Head of Programming, who has been playing the role of Programming Coordinator for the last 4 years. Graduated from the central university, he is currently doing a master's degree in visual culture at the University of Lund, Sweden with the support of Colfuturo and Lund Global Scholarship. Since 2018 he has been linked to FICCI – Cartagena de Indias International Film Festival in the programming area and since 2019 he has been in charge of the Programming Coordination area.
In 2022 he was in charge of coordinating the category of Bammers and assisting the coordination of the call for the Bogotá Audiovisual Market. He has also participated in different festivals such as The Classics (production coordinator), FICPRISMA (head of programming), IndieBo – Bogotá Independent Film Festival (curator of the Colombia section and assistant artistic director). Likewise, he was part of the research of the project Todos las Vidas Valen, First Urban Museum of Memory in Latin America.
