About
The St. Moritz Art Film Festival is the first festival in the world dedicated to films by artists and directors of arthouse movies and also the first festival to bring film and video art works to the Canton of Grisons in Switzerland.
The St. Moritz Art Film Festival (SMAFF) was founded in 2020 as a non-profit association, with the declared intent of organising a national and international cinema and audio-visual festival in St.Moritz and the Swiss Engadin Valley and of fostering the dissemination of cinema, art and audiovisual culture at the cantonal, national and international level.
The core activities of the Festival (projections, talks & debates) will happen on a yearly basis in St. Moritz at end of August. Collateral activities including digital events and presentations throughout the year will contribute to enlarging the global outreach of the festival and to increasing the visibility of the initiative.
The aim of the Festival is to raise awareness and to promote international cinema in all its forms: visual art, video art and films, as a coherent audio- visual expression, in the spirit of freedom and dialogue. In line with the sections mentioned in the following paragraphs, SMAFF organises retrospectives and tributes to major figures as a contribution towards a better understanding of a specific theme chosen by the Director every year. The coherent development of a theme triggers debates in philosophical, social and cultural fields.
SMAFF will occupy an exclusive and refined place within the international arts and film scene defined largely by its focus on art and film, its location within the Swiss Alps, the historical Engadin Valley and the already well-developed St. Moritz cultural scene.
Executive Board
The Executive Board is constituted of seven members elected by the General Assembly of Members of the SMAFF. It is composed of:
- Martin Hatebur, Chairman
- Francesca Ariani
- Elena Foster
- Dominik Keller
- Rolf Sachs
- Dario Suter
The Chairman
The first chairman of the St. Moritz Film Festival is Dr. Martin Hatebur. Dr. Martin Hatebur works since 2001 as an independent attorney at law advising different international clients such as the Nestlé Group of companies, Basilea Pharmaceutica AG, Basel, Flexico Sarl, Paris, Galerie Jousse-Entreprise, Paris, White Cube Gallery, London, Galerie Meyer Riegger, Berlin, etc.
Besides his activity as an attorney at law, Martin Hatebur collects contemporary art and is a member of different art institutions and museums worldwide. In particular, since 2008 he is President of the Kunsthalle Basel. Martin Hatebur, a Swiss national, lives and works between St.Moritz, Basel and Paris.
The Artistic Director
Stefano Rabolli Pansera, Founder and Director of St. Moritz Art Film Festival, is an architect and curator. After graduating with Honours at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London in 2005, he worked with Herzog de Meuron in Basel from 2005 to 2007 and he taught at the AA as Unit Master from 2007 to 2011.
In 2013, he founded Beyond Entropy Ltd, a curatorial agency operating at the threshold of art, architecture and geopolitics and developing projects in Africa, Europe and the Mediterranean coastline.
He curated several national pavilions at La Biennale di Venezia and, in 2013, he was the recipient of the Golden Lion for best national participation for the Angola Pavilion.
In 2015, he designed Mangiabarche open-air gallery and directed the exhibition programme for the MACC, a non-for-profit space in the South West of Sardinia.
From 2017 until 2022, Stefano worked as director for Hauser & Wirth Gallery in London and opened the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in St. Moritz, while continuing working on several initiatives in Europe and Asia and developing institutional projects with Christoph Büchel and with the Panza Collection.
Managing Director
Curator and Head of Public Programme
Ewa Hess
Head of Digital Outreach
Nogol Zahabi is a Swiss based researcher born in Tehran from architect parents in 1982. Graduated from Architectural Association in London in 2007, she studied Cinematic Architecture with Pascal Schoning and had her first solo exhibition on Le Corbusier Le Cabanon, a 9 minutes film in Cité radieuse Briey.
Art Advisory Board
The Art Advisory Board is an independent group of opinion leaders, collectors, cultural activists and influencers, proposed by members of the Executive Board. The mission of the Art Advisory Board is to promote the activities of the Festival internationally, to elevate the cultural profile of the activities and to broaden the reach of the audience. It is composed of:
- Michel Auder
- Johannes Binotto
- Lionel Bouvier
- Sabine Boss
- Bob Colacello
- Stuart Comer
- Matt Dillon
- Marie Donnelly
- Elena Filipovic
- Ladina Florineth
- Todd Haynes
- Maja Hoffmann
- Samuel Keller
- Udo Kier
- Andrea Lissoni
- Matthias Lerf
- Anthony McCarten
- Shahryar Nashat
- Hans-Ulrich Obrist
- Iouri Podladtchikov
- Pipilotti Rist
- Adam Szymczyk
- Diana Segantini
- Roya Sachs
- Tilda Swinton
- Not Vital
- John Waters
- Oskar Weiss
Programme and Line-up
A yearly theme is selected by the Artistic Director. It offers a “fil rouge” through a program of premiere feature films, short films, video art and other audiovisual material, as well as debates with philosophers, writers, and global opinion leaders. The yearly theme helps the festival community to see the existing and new films in a specific context. New perspectives of thought and action are made possible.
Destination Partner
Official and Exclusive Luxury Hospitality and Catering Partner
Sponsors
Technical Sponsor
