‘News’ Archives
Off Cinema: the winners
The 13th Off Cinema documentary festival was held in Poznań, Poland, between last Wednesday and Sunday, during which a jury comprising documentary-makers Maciej Drygas and Edyta Wróblewska, critics/historians Andrzej Kołodyński and Michael Brooke and festival programmer Piotr Kotowski watched forty films and picked five winners, namely:• [...]
Pasqua at the Crossroads
In addition to giving awards for completed films, the Thessaloniki International Film Festival also champions them at the pre-production stage, and this year's winner of the Crossroads Co-Production Forum award (worth $15,000) is Pasqua, a Slovenian-Czech-Montenegran co-production being developed by writer-director Ivan Marinovic.More details at [...]
Czech cinema in November
Thanks to an upcoming Riverside Studios Cinema season of the films of Jan and Zdeněk Svěrák, and the imminent release of the first English-subtitled DVD of Jiri Menzel's I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2007), I've decided to devote much of November to exploring the work of the two most internationally [...]
Sight & Sound: Cinema of the New Europe
Sight & Sound's special issue, 'Cinema of the New Europe', was published this week. The coverdate is June 08, though the Andrzej Klimowski-designed cover makes it instantly recognisable from a fair distance. As the title implies, it's an Eastern European special edition, including the following articles: 'Out of the Past' by Shane Danielsen [...]
East of Berlin
Here's a very promising initiative - a blog set up by Roy Stafford to accompany a series of evening classes on central European cinema that he's teaching at the National Media Museum in Bradford. The first instalment is a short introduction to the films of Andrzej Wajda.
Another 100 Classics
I'm hoping to get the first two or three entries in my 100 Classics project uploaded later this week - but in the meantime, blogger Dennis Grunes has been doing something very similar.His list has a fair overlap with mine, though he hasn't adopted the "maximum two films per director, must be available on English-friendly DVD" restrictions, and he [...]
Intermission
I'm spending the next few days at the Matita Film Festival in Guardiagrele, Italy, introducing a retrospective of Quay Brothers films - so there probably won't be any new posts until Sunday. Apologies to those checking the Katyń links for new additions: I'll update them as soon as I can.
100 Classics
In an attempt to make this blog rather less obscure and hermetic than it's been thus far, I'm starting a new series that aims to give a general overview of the history of Russian and Eastern European cinema from the perspective of a hundred of its most distinguished titles. The full shortlist is here - and was assembled according to these [...]
Introduction
Welcome to Kinoblog, intended as a repository for things that I dig up in my ongoing research into central and eastern European cinema that I haven't managed to turn into professional commissions. In fact, they'll often be by-products of background research for interviews and overviews where I have to gloss over individual titles in a few dozen [...]