Armed secret police were everywhere during the dress rehearsal for Maklena Grasa – in the dressing rooms with the actors, in the wings and members of the notorious Cheka were crammed into every seat of the theatre. Written by Mykola Kulish in 1933, Maklena Grasa was seen as a deviation of Soviet Ukrainian culture by the Soviet…
| 25/05/2018
In Stanislav Rostotsky’s 1968 film We’ll live ‘til Monday, screened last week at the Regent Street Cinema as part of Kino Klassika’s ‘Youth on the March!’ film season, three schoolteachers play out hopes and regrets in midst of an atmosphere of youthful rebellion. English teacher Natasha’s young and idealistic, and deeply in love with her…
| 15/05/2018
To celebrate the fantastic world of filmmaker Jiří Brdečka (1917-1982), one of the founding fathers of Czech animation, the Czech Centre London and Limonádový Joe s.r.o. organised a screening of eight of Brdečka’s short animations at Regent Street Cinema, followed by a Q&A with the artist’s daughter, Tereza Brdečková. Brdečka’s talents ranged from journalism to…
| 08/05/2018
Ioana’s in a coffee shop taking a call, she leaves in a hurry and then disappears around a corner. There’s a screech of brakes and the sound of a collision. Subsequently, we see a man at a graveside leaving flowers. A few weeks after his wife’s buried, the man, Alexandru, turns 42. Alone in his apartment…
| 30/04/2018
Youth on the March! The Rise of the Soviet New Wave – a film season in collaboration with MUBI, the UK’s leading online film streaming platform, showcases the Soviet New Wave’s most exhilarating films at Regent Street Cinema from May to June 2018. Tracing the clash of generations from the Thaw to Perestroika, Youth on the…
| 30/04/2018
The advertising material played before the start of Ana Mon Amour said Romania couldn’t make bad movies. Although tongue in cheek, it shows the confidence of the Romanian New Wave that’s enjoyed a sustainable wind for some time now.Ana Mon Amour is one of the latest offerings of this movement – and the film’s director…
| 25/04/2018
The Jester, a Polish movie in Yiddish co-directed by Joseph Green and Jan Nowina-Przybylsk in 1937 and restored by the National Center for Jewish Film in 2008, transports us into the world of a vibrant Yiddish culture, values and humour prior to the First World War. The black-and-white movie narrates a romantic tale set against…
| 05/04/2018
Of all the great Russian writers of the second half of the nineteenth century, none perfected the art of dualism quite like Anton Chekhov. The tragic and the comic, the internal and the external, the serious and the trivial, the lived and the imagined – in his work all coexist and converge; the borders between…
| 29/03/2018
Romania’s foreign-language submission for the 2018 Academy Awards, The Fixer had its British premiere this month at the Romanian Cultural Institute in London as part of Cinematheque, a monthly programme that focuses on promoting Romanian cinema. The movie comes out of the Romanian neo-realist cinema tradition that recently claimed prizes at Cannes and Berlin (Cristi…
| 27/03/2018
2018 is the year of anniversaries in Czech history with the Prague Spring (1968), the communist takeover (1948), the National Socialist annexation of the Sudetenland (1938) and – most significantly – the founding of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918. An award-winning film that ties the legacy of the First Czechoslovak Republic together with the…
| 16/03/2018