‘Countries’ Archives
Girls
Lányok Hungary, 2007, colour, 90 minsThe opening titles of Anna Faur's disturbing feature debut begin with what looks like a standard disclaimer about the events and people depicted in the film being imaginary – presumably a Hungarian audience would have picked up on the fact that she sourced her material from a true story that hit the [...]
Sarajevo Snapshot 2
On his first visit in the 1960s, Roman Polanski apparently observed that London was "a very red city" thanks to the Routemaster buses, phone and letter boxes, etc. There's plenty of red here in Sarajevo too, thanks to the many, many Film Festival posters, but the colour that I keep encountering in the city centre is green, whether the vertiginous [...]
Snow
Snijeg Bosnia-Herzegovina/Germany/France/Iran, 2008, colour, 100 minsThe Sarajevo Film Festival got off to a strong start last night with the Bosnian premiere of Aida Begić’s debut feature, already the winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes’ Semaine de la Critique. If it initially seemed incongruous that a small-scale drama whose most telling [...]
Sarajevo Snapshot 1
Judging from my own experience, and conversations with people who'd last visited Sarajevo four or five years ago, the festival's budget has been growing year on year, and a good sign of this was in the lavishness of the opening night party. It was pretty good in 2006, held in a hillside restaurant overlooking the city's twinkling lights, but all [...]
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 [...]
Valerie and her Disc of Wonders
For a tiny DVD label that's so obviously run on a shoestring, Second Run has always punched well above its weight when it comes to creating a distinctive brand identity. Even in the very early stages, when they'd source the artwork from a single still, they had an admirably consistent approach to layout and typography - and, pretty much uniquely [...]
Andrzej Wajda: An Introduction
This is the complete text of the introduction to Andrzej Wajda that I gave at BFI Southbank (May 6) and the POSK Polish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith (May 24) - this is the slightly revised POSK version. I've added release dates and Polish original titles to reflect Kinoblog's house style, but otherwise this is pretty much as it was [...]
Anthology of Polish Experimental Animation
I'm acutely conscious that amongst the many failings of this blog is the lack of coverage of animation (something that's even more unforgivable when you consider that I have strong personal and professional interests in the subject), but if anything's going to galvanise me into paying it more attention, it's the imminent release of what looks like [...]
Senses of Cinema
The latest edition of online journal Senses of Cinema has several lengthy articles devoted to aspects of central and eastern European cinema, including: Sweet Movie: The Gentle Side of "Destructive Art" by Dušan Makavejev The World Tasted: Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie by Lorraine Mortimer Slovak Cinema of the 1970s Revisited by Peter [...]
Checking the Gate
As highlighted by my last post, this week sees the launch of the 'Check the Gate' festival of recent(ish) Hungarian cinema - and since I've now managed to see six-and-a-half out of the seven features being screened, here's a sneak preview of what's showing. Given that the festival's function is to provide a snapshot of what's been happening in [...]