“Sister“ is a winner of Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival. The film is a stunning and poetic narrative about a twelve-years-old Simon (Kacey Mottet Klein) and his unemployed sisters‘ (Léa Seydoux) life in a Swiss town. Every day the boy goes up the mountain that is a skiing heaven for him. There he experiences adventures of every kind, explores adult life, is involved in promiscuity as well as discovers a peculiar way of getting mature. A soft, magnificent and poetic drama “Sister” is an Ursula Meier’s masterpiece about a child who wants to rise above all in a physical, social and financial way.
Ursula Meier as an independent filmmaker started her carrier in 1994 with her first short film “Isaac’s Dream“. “Sister” is her second feature fiction. Meier is a film maker of a wide range of film genres. Among them are feature films “Table Manners“, “Around Pinget“, “Neither Cops Nor Blacks Nor Whites” described as unusual and very different documentaries. Ursula Meier introduced her first feature fiction film “Home“ at Cannes IFF in 2008. It was awarded as the best Swiss feature fiction film as well as the best screenplay in Swiss Cinema awards. Kaunas IFF programme includes all these films in the full retrospective of Ursula Meier, which is being presented together with the promotion agency for Swiss filmmaking SWISS FILMS.
Kaunas IFF this year is also presenting the retrospective of the Swedish director Roy Andersson who is one of the auteurs from the North that has created his own universe. Roy Anderssons first feature film “Swedish Love Story” won four awards at the Berlin International Film Festival 1970. In 2000, thirty years after the debut film Roy Andersson went to the Cannes Film Festival with “Songs from the Second Floor” and won the Special jury prize. The long and slow process of Roy Anderssons’ creation can be seen in the documentary “Tomorrow’s Another Day” as well as in the full retrospective of feature films and short films including rarely seen films from Andersons’ film school years. Kaunas IFF also sheds light on not so well-known abroad but a significant film history figure in his home country Latvia, Rolands Kalnins who made films that were highly innovative for the period they were created in and almost equally highly damaged by the Soviet censorship. R. Kalnins films to be presented: “Stone and Flinders”, “Four White Shirts”, and “Maritime Climate”. These retrospectives are being presented in cooperation with the Swedish Film Institute and the National Film Centre of Latvia.
The sixth Kaunas International Film Festival takes place September 26 – October 7. In Kaunas and Vilnius, afterwards Festival will be touring in three smaller cities in Lithuania.
For more information:Renata Bartusevičiūtė | +370 645 83717 | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | www.kinofestivalis.lt
