Yelizaveta Smith and Georg Genoux’s School Number Three is a documentary with a deceptively simple storyline: it records stories told by teenagers who have lived through the crisis in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, which started almost four years ago in November 2013. Based on the documentary play by Natalia Vorozhbyt – one of Ukraine’s leading playwrights…
| 03/10/2017
Lithuanian villages, as in most of Eastern Europe, are now in semi-terminal decline. Once lively places known for their traditions and values, they are increasingly deserted. Schools are closing down, and once-thriving churches becoming monuments to the past. So when CEEL contributor Agne Dovydaityte found her grandfather’s diary, detailing daily life in one such settlement…
| 12/09/2017
You know when it’s just been raining very heavily and suddenly the clouds break and the sun shines through? That’s what Trupa Trupa’s music sounds like as intense loud passages give way to gentle quiet interludes. This four-piece from Gdansk were making only their second U.K. appearance but they held the attention of the audience…
| 09/09/2017
One of the highlights of this year’s Open City Docs festival is a quartet of documentaries by an almost unknown (in the UK) 53 year-old Ukrainian Jewish film-maker, Vitaly Mansky who, since his debut in 1989, has now completed over 30 films, and been nominated four times for the prestigious Nika award. His fidelity to…
| 07/09/2017
Alec Secareanu plays Gheorghe Ionescu in God’s Own Country, the award-winning debut feature film by writer/director Francis Lee, which tells the story of a young Yorkshire farmer who finds himself caught up in a love story with a Romanian farm worker. A powerful film, bracingly different from mainstream LGBT cinema, it’s also unwittingly reflective of…
| 01/09/2017
August 28, 2017 PRIVATE CHRONICLES. MONOLOGUE. VITALY MANSKY / 1999 / RUSSIA / 95′ WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 2017 – 20:30 Exploring the collective life of the generation born as Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, Mansky worked with over 5,000 hours of home movies to create this unique chronicle of everyday life in the…
| 28/08/2017
Xameleon Theatre treat London audiences to a new insight into the life and works of Chekhov in their innovative production Love in a Nutshell at the Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone. Performed in Russian with English subtitles, the production adapts nine of the playwright’s short stories on the theme of love and marriage, linked by a commentary from…
| 22/06/2017
The most recent event in the Revolution17 series, organised by Dash Arts, took place on 24 May at Rich Mix, focusing on the fate of Russian émigrés who fled the country after the October Revolution. The organisers chose to shape the evening around the figure of Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya), a famous satirical writer and poetess…
| 07/06/2017
When we were admitted to the venue, the mere five tables arranged in the sizeable room made it clear some dancing was expected. The audience was only small, about thirty, but ten of these were up dancing for most of the show and that’s a decent ratio. This duo from St Petersburg performed almost non-stop…
| 07/06/2017
Marin Sorescu’s Jonah was originally published in 1968 and is considered the playwright’s masterpiece. It’s the famous monologue of the Old Testament fisherman, who endures his dark night of the soul trapped inside a whale. ‘Jonah! Jonah!’, he cries out, first arriving on stage. ‘Actually I myself am Jonah’, he confides to us. ‘I call…
| 21/05/2017