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.