The world tour continues: At the 24th edition of the FilmFestival Cottbus, the >globalEAST< programme section ventures south and searches for Eastern European influences on our neighbours in Italy. With a total of seven productions, the series provides insights into the mutual cinematographic ties between both regions.
For quite a number of years, Eastern European film nations have been collaborating with their Italian colleagues. The most recent development is the cooperation fund “RE-ACT” (“Regional Audiovisual Cooperation und Training”) of the Friuli Venezia Giulia Audiovisual Fund, the Croatian Audiovisual Centre and the Slovenian Film Centre, whose foundation was announced at this year’s International Film Festival in Venice.
With TIR (Italy, Croatia 2013), an exemplary Italian-Croatian coproduction was selected which has attracted a lot of international attention at film festivals. Director Alberto Fasulo, who will personally present his film in Cottbus and also act as a member of the DIALOGUE Jury, tells the story of the Croatian long-distance lorry driver Branko. In an almost documentary style, the daily life of the permanent traveller is shown, far away from his family, constantly on the road from A to B all across Europe.
Cinematography in Italy and in Albania have strong traditional ties. BOTA (Albania, Italy 2014) by the Albanian director Iris Elezi, who will be a festival guest in Cottbus, and Thomas Logoreci stand for this intensive collaboration. In the café “Bota”, Albanian for “the world”, located somewhere in the Albanian province, not much usually happens – until an Italian construction unit arrives to renovate the street.
LATE SEASON | LA MEZZA STAGIONE (Italy, Romania 2014) shows that it is not always money from the West that funds Eastern European projects, but that it can also work the other way around. The study of a small town in southern Italy was produced with Romanian funding and shows the bleak everyday life of three protagonists and their approach to the town’s soundscape.
MY CLASS | LA MIA CLASSE (Italy 2013) by Daniele Gaglianone also deals with the realities of daily life in Italy. Immigrants from various nations, from Ukraine, to Egypt, all the way to Bangladesh, meet in an Italian language course. The students and their fates are real, only the teacher is an actor – an exciting filmic experiment that also raises the question of the filmmaker’s responsibility in a world shaped by global problems.
The short film SHOES FROM TRIESTE | ŠUOLNI IZ TRSTA (Germany 2014) features scenic memories of life in the Italian-Slovenian border region immediately after the Second World War, while the short documentary WINTER (Russia 2013) portrays the cold season in majestic images.
Lech Majewski’s FIELD OF DOGS | PSIE POLE (Poland 2014) is also visually stunning: Celebrated by the Italian press as the “rebirth of Dante in Poland”, surrealistic, oftentimes painterly images are combined with the recitation of “The Divine Comedy” to form an impressive artistic synthesis.
This year, the >globalEAST< programme series was compiled in collaboration with the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Berlin. The 24th FilmFestival Cottbus is supported and funded by the State of Brandenburg, the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH, the City of Cottbus and its first partners, Vattenfall and Creative Europe – MEDIA.
24th Film Festival Cottbus infomation