Special Program
View People View Cities
—The World of UNESCO Creative Cities
Call for Entries
As UNESCO Creative City of Film from Japan, Yamagata City is pleased to announce an open call for exceptional films about cities and people. The films should come from cities designated by the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the field of Film. Selected films will be showcased together to celebrate the diversity and shared experiences of lives of people in pulsing cities.
Hosted by Yamagata City and the Yamagata Creative City Promotion Council, this event aims to present a program of exceptional films from the cities designated by the UNESCO Creative Cities Network in the field of Film. From an open call, films made in or by filmmakers from the 20 Creative Cities excluding Yamagata (see list below) “about cities, its residents, and their daily lives,” the organizers will choose three to five films for public screening during the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival 2023 to be held in October 2023. There is no restriction on genre, length, or year of production.
The UNESCO Creative Cities Network (UCCN) was created in 2004 to promote cooperation with and among cities that have identified creativity as a strategic factor for sustainable urban development. The 295 cities of this network work together towards a common objective: placing creativity and cultural industries at the heart of their development plans at the local level and cooperating actively at the international level. Film is one of the seven creative fields of the UCCN, and there are currently 21 designated Cities of Film around the world.
- They are:
- Bitola (Macedonia), Bradford (UK), Bristol (UK), Busan (South Korea), Cannes (France), Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Galway (Ireland), Gdynia (Poland), Łódź (Poland), Mumbai (India), Potsdam (Germany), Qingdao (China), Rome (Italy), Santos (Brazil), Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Sofia (Bulgaria), Sydney (Australia), Terrassa (Spain), Valladolid (Spain), Wellington (New Zealand), Yamagata (Japan).
For more information 
UNESCO Creative Cities Network website