There’s no shortage of documentaries about Balkan atrocities – it’s virtually a sub-genre on Youtube – but few have been as affectingly or coolly told as Ognjen Glavonić’s Depth Two, which deals with events during the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999, when – soon after – a truck containing 53 unidentified dead bodies was…
| 21/06/2016
Polish theatre director Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Phaedra(s) is in London from the Odeon Theatre de l’Europe in Paris. An ambitious play, it’s made up of three very different versions of the Greek myth of Phaedra, wife of King Theseus, who’s seized by a passionate and fatal love for her stepson Hippolytus. Three and a half hours…
| 15/06/2016
SERGEI LOZNITSA / 2015 / BELGIUM / 74′ In August 1991, hardline communists staged a coup in Moscow, hoping to overthrow Gorbachev’s liberal rule. Loznitsa ignores the main stage events on the streets of Moscow, to take a sidelong look at The Event in a city 400 miles from the centre of the storm. As in both…
| 15/06/2016
Drahomíra Vihanová’s A Squandered Sunday, shown at the Barbican last week, was the UK premiere of a film made in 1969, but shown for the first time – for political reasons – only at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival nearly 20 years later. Based on a true story, the film follows an ordinary Sunday in the…
| 07/06/2016
‘In recent years Romanian films have won prizes and praise a-plenty: it’s time to explore what makes them so special! The Romanian Cultural Institute in London an the British Film Institute proudly announce the opening of ‘Revolution in Realism: The New Romanian Cinema’ – the biggest showcase of Romanian cinema ever to have taken place in Britain, and possibly beyond. Do not miss…
| 01/06/2016
Alongside Miloš Forman, Ivan Passer, and Jiří Menzel, Drahomíra Vihanová was a prominent member of the Czechoslovak New Wave, but unlike some of her contemporaries, she remained in her country after the Prague Spring in 1968, only to have her work heavily censored. As a result, her films have never been seen in the UK.…
| 28/05/2016
‘How many children dream of being Jesus!?’ This question echoes throughout Maria Manolescu’s I’m Not Jesus Christ, and we all learn in this blackly comic tale that the answer is a contradictory one. Written by Maria Manolescu in 2007, I’m Not Jesus Christ showcases both British and Romanian actors, with a pleasing mixture of accents…
| 16/05/2016
‘Revolution in Realism: The Forerunners As a prelude to the biggest retrospective of Romanian film ever to have graced the British screens, the Romanian Cinematheque in 1 Belgrave Square runs a series of special screenings focusing on the creative antecedents of the New Romanian Cinema. Join us for a month of timeless films that will…
| 13/05/2016
It’s now exactly 30 years since the death of Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), the world-renowned Romanian philosopher, religious historian and writer. This year also marks the ground-breaking publication in English of one of his first novels, The Diary of a Shortsighted Adolescent, by Istros Books. The Romanian Institute in London do a great job at marking…
| 12/05/2016
In 2014, a small, resolutely arty, black and white film delivered a seismic shock to Poland’s film industry, which had been wheezing along in uninspired fashion for years. The improbable story of a nun exploring her Jewish roots, Ida toured world festivals to widespread acclaim, eventually winning director Paweł Pawlikowski a foreign film Oscar. So…
| 15/04/2016