‘Romania’ Archives
The East End Film Festival
The 2009 East End Film Festival launches tomorrow - in the words of the organisers:The East End Film Festival showcases hot new talent and homegrown films alongside larger independent releases and special events, informing and inspiring a new generation of filmmakers and audiences from across London and beyond, and raising the profile of this [...]
Sarajevo 2006/2008
When I started this blog just over a year ago, I did so with a long list of ambitions, chief among them being that I was going to keep the promise of its subtitle "a survey of Central and Eastern European cinema" by visiting the Gdynia, Plzeň, Budapest and Sarajevo Film Festivals every year and thereby end up sampling the vast majority of the [...]
Home & Away
Not a post in tribute to the Australian soap opera, but an announcement about London's fifth Romanian Film Festival, running from Thursday 10 to Sunday 13 April. As with its Polish counterpart, it's been growing apace over the years, though this time it's as much to do with a surge in quality as any population increase. It's at the Curzon [...]
Best Foreign Film Oscar longlist announced
According to the Hollywood Reporter, a record 63 films are on the initial longlist for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. The full list is here, and these are the Central and Eastern European submissions: Azerbaijan: Caucasia (d. Farid Gumbatov) Bosnia and Herzegovina: It's Hard to Be Nice/Teško je biti fin (d. Srđan Vuletić) - [...]
Sight & Sound on Romanian cinema
A small selection of articles and reviews from the latest issue of Sight & Sound has just gone online, including Nick Roddick's admirably comprehensive report on current Romanian cinema, discussing the origins of its terrific run of artistic successes over the last two years, and whether this is sustainable given the parlous state of the [...]
Update
Apologies for the lack of updates - things have been insanely busy over the past fortnight, what with the Ken Russell retrospective at BFI Southbank (for which I contributed a 75-minute illustrated talk and met the man himself a few days later) and various other work-related things - including an interview about Jan Švankmajer for MovieMail's [...]
Latcho Drom
Technically a French film, but you'd never know, Tony Gatlif's 1993 film Latcho Drom (which translates as 'Safe Journey') is an enthralling Cinemascope panorama tracing the thousand-year passage of the gypsies from India to Western Europe via Egypt, Turkey, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia. There's no dialogue or conventional narrative: everything [...]
12:08 East of Bucharest
Last night I reacquainted myself with Corneliu Poromboiu's delightful 12:08 East of Bucharest (A fost sau n-a fost?, 2006), a practically zero-budget Romanian comedy that scores spectacular value for money in the laughs department. I'd previously seen it last year, when it opened the Sarajevo Film Festival, screening in a gigantic open-air venue [...]