The gadulka’s role in a Bulgarian folk orchestra might be compared the viola’s in a Western classical orchestra. Like the viola, it has bowed strings. Like the viola, it supports the other instruments, providing a sort of musical backbone, but doesn’t quite work as a solo instrument. And, like violists, gadulka players find themselves the…
| March 10, 2016
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a group of naïve Bosnian students triggered World War I – so most historians claim at least. Yet The Cause by Jeremy James at Jermyn St. Theatre tells us the story of another plot – one that could have prevented the Great War altogether. Uncle Sándor (Tony Wredden)…
| March 9, 2016
Dan Cruickshank is a writer, art historian, architectural consultant and broadcaster who’s made numerous history and culture programmes for the BBC including Around the World in Eighty Treasures; Under Fire: Culture and Conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq; The Country House Revealed, and Warsaw: Resurrecting History. In London on February 16th, he descended on Ognisko Polskie’s…
| February 21, 2016
Barely four years after the official end of the war in Bosnia, the BBC aired the two-part drama Warriors (1999), a fictionalised account of a British battalion sent to Bosnia from ’92-’93 (the height of the war there) under the auspices of UNPROFOR, the UN peacekeeping force. Written by Leigh Jackson and directed by Peter…
| December 23, 2015
I was fortunate enough to be at the Ukrainian Cinema Days press conference at the Ukrainian Embassy last week, excited to hear what the organisers had to say about the launch of their film festival programme showing at Rich Mix in East London. Igor Iankovsky, founder of Charity Foundation Initiative for the Future and main sponsor of…
| December 21, 2015
Velosiped, Away and Once upon a Mine are three short films produced in 2015, shown this month at London’s Ukrainian Film Festival. They vary in length between just over two minutes (Velosiped) and half an hour (Once upon a Mine). While of course a film’s duration doesn’t tell us anything about its quality, it’s interesting…
| December 19, 2015
Ukraine’s past and present collide dramatically in Oles Sanin’s 2014 film The Guide (Povodyr’) where raw feelings of romantic nationalism stirred up by contemporary events bubble to the surface in the retelling of another dark period of the country’s history. In Sanin’s second feature-length production, today’s emotions are projected onto the 1930s, when Moscow-imposed famine,…
| December 19, 2015
‘Friends tell me that Bosnia is finished, and that I should move on somewhere else. But to me, that’s rather as if someone who you loved very much has had a horrible disfiguring accident, and you say to yourself, ‘All right. I’ll go and find someone else. I won’t bother about that person any more.”…
| December 11, 2015
The Living Fire is a documentary record of a dying light. In the highlands of the Carpathian Mountains, an entire way of life is fading, one that has sustained generations but whose extreme hardships are a deterrent to new generations. Ostap Kostyuk’s 2014 directorial debut, produced by the National Cinematheque of Ukraine and supported by…
| December 6, 2015
Call Me Marianna is Karolina Bielawska’s first Polish feature film: a documentary about a man’s decision to undergo gender reassignment. A hit at the Sao Jorge International Queer Film Festival, it previously won four awards on its premiere at the Krakow Film Festival too, and it’s easy to see why: with recent media coverage of…
| November 20, 2015