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
‘KINOTEKA Polish Film Festival takes place in London each spring. Organised by the Polish Cultural Institute in London, the festival celebrates the best of Polish cinema and culture. Each year audiences can enjoy a selection of film and documentary screenings, both classic and contemporary, as well as talks and Q&As with the filmmakers. A selection…
| 05/03/2018
When Maria Draždechová (Zuzana Mauréry) enters her new classroom, she invites her new students to a round of introductions – as one would. Yet Draždechová isn’t so much interested in the children as in what their parents do: the ‘poor widow’ of a Russian officer, Draždechová gradually coerces the parents into helping her with errands…
| 16/11/2017
Alongside household names such as Miloš Forman and František Vláčil, Jan Němec was one of the key personalities responsible for the pioneering Czechoslovak New Wave cinema of the 1960s. Given his death at the age of seventy-nine on the final day of shooting, Vlk z Královských Vinohrad (The Wolf from Royal Vineyard Street) was…
| 14/11/2017