‘Events and Festivals’ Archives
Kinoteka 2010 highlights
London's 8th Kinoteka Polish Film Festiwal (sic), organised by the Polish Cultural Institute, has just announced dates and highlights. Spanning 4 March to 12 April 2010, it offers a cornucopia of delights including:An exploration of history past and present, looking at Poland under Communist rule; Borys Lankosz’s opening night film at the [...]
Paradjanov Festival 2010
Here's some genuinely thrilling news - March 2010 sees a major multimedia retrospective of the unclassifiable work of the great Armenian-born Soviet-persecuted filmmaker-artist Sergei Paradjanov, to be staged in multiple venues across London and Bristol. The website is already pretty comprehensive, even though it doesn't include full timetables [...]
Alpine alliances
A three-day co-production market is being staged as a sidebar of the Les Arcs Film Festival in the eponymous French ski resort.Projects being discussed and hopefully packaged include new features from Attila Gigor (whose The Investigator was one of the brightest Hungarian debuts in recent years), his compatriots Bálint Kenyeres, Réka Kincses and [...]
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:• [...]
Punitive Expedition
Büntetőexpedició Hungary, 1970, black and white, 34 mins. Is there another national film culture that has devoted so much screen time to the study of horses? Not merely in the sense of lots of them on screen at any one time (there are plenty of American-made Westerns that offer much in that department), but in the way that many [...]
Capriccio
Hungary, 1969, colour, 16 mins. Ostensibly a non-narrative study of various aspects of a rural winter, this short film by one of modern Hungarian cinema's greatest visual poets has all the spellbinding qualities of his better-known feature debut Sindbad (Szindbád, 1971), but here allied to a winning sense of humour that's never quite [...]
Ten Thousand Suns
Tízezer nap. Hungary, 1965/67, black and white, 110 mins. One of the most impressive Hungarian directorial debuts, Ten Thousand Suns offers clinching proof that Miklós Jancsó wasn't the only mid-1960s master routinely offering breathtaking widescreen compositions featuring hundreds of men and horses. Shot by Sándor [...]
Cold Days
Hideg napok. Hungary, 1966, black and white, 96 mins. It's hard to fault the title: virtually every scene in András Kovács' powerful film is either set outdoors in snow that audibly crunches underfoot, or in a white-walled prison cell where central heating clearly isn't a top priority. The latter is occupied by four [...]
Twenty Hours
Húsz óra Hungary, 1965, black and white, 110 mins The investigative narrative and flashback structure of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane has been used more than once to frame a central European political subject. The best-known example is Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru), written in 1963 but not filmed until 1976, but Zoltán [...]
Swimming-Pools
Strand Hungary, 1963, black and white, 14 minsNot so much a documentary as an often near-abstract study of bodies on beaches, much of István Ventilla's film uses extreme telephoto foreshortening to reduce people to constituent parts. Flesh is contrasted with sand, stone and grass, and with other examples: hairy and smooth legs almost seem to be [...]