Visualising the cultural diversity of Eastern Europe: This is the aim the FilmFestival Cottbus pursues with its >Focus programme section. Last year, the visualisation concentrated on the various regions and thus on the, often historicaly grown, cultural gateways across borders. This year, between 6th and 11th November 2012, the 22nd festival issue targets this diversity under the heading "Eastern Europe by Religions". The total number of 15 feature films and documentaries, compiled by curator Bernd Buder (Berlin), are intended to provide insights into religious life and religiousness as it is practised today. One has to bear in mind the fact that the Eastern part of Europe is characterised by the coexistence of and cooperation between different religions denominations such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam; in many places, a characteristic with a long-standing tradition over many centuries. The programme series intends to identify the opportunities as well as the risks inherent in this multi-religious form of life, for often enough, religion was and still is abused in the propaganda of political struggles for power, rendering it a catalyst for conflicts between ethnicities. Given this background, "Eastern Europe by Religions" aims at providing food for thought as well as at triggering and intensifying the current debate regarding the significance of religion.
This year, our >Focus shows films illustrting the topics of religion and church, religious rites and symbols in a very diverse manner. For instance, THE DAUGHTER (Russia 2012) explores a small town priest's moral conflict between the seal of the confessional and personal thoughts of revenge, whereas MERCY (Poland 2012) brings to the screen the tensions between secular and clerical life in Poland. By contrast, the persiflage LOVELESS ZORICA (Serbia, Poland, Cyprus, Greece 2012) stirs up the murky waters that are the ambivalent relationship between righteousness and superstition in the Serbian province. Ultimately, with meditative snapshots of internal landscapes of the soul, the director of DREAMING THE PATH (Lithuania 2012) takes the audience on a nearly 4,500 kilometre-long journey along the Road from Vilnius to Santiago de Compostela.
Processes of finding one's self, questions of identity and the search for one's place in society: The whopping number of five films in this year's >Focus investigates religion by way of coming-of-age stories. Members of a right-wing radical group of youths in the Polish-Israeli co-production MY AUSTRALIA(2011) and a hooligan in the Polish documentary THE MOON IS JEWISH (2011) – the protagonists of both films are confronted by their own Jewish ancestry and thereby are forced to reconsider their views. Conversely, HOW ARE YOU, RUDOLF MING? (Latvia 2010) centres around a
young maker of animation films, Rudolf, who has a penchant for bloodthirsty horror stories and who is invited by the parish priest to create an animation film based on a story from the Old Testament and to screen it in the church. IVETKA AND THE MOUNTAIN (Czech Republic 2008) narrates the life story of a girl, who, in the 1990s, repeatedly had visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary and who is torn between life in a monastery and a secular life. Finally, the Polish feature film IN THE NAME OF THE DEVIL (2011) demonstrates the dangers of blinding religious zeal with its story of how a charismatic leader misdirects a group of young women searching for their true self into the spheres of radical ideology.
The issue of historical relationships between society, state and religion plays a decisive role in the film making of the post-Communist countries in Eastern Europe. The Church being in opposition to the socialist state was a deeply formative phenomenon in particular in Poland. Thus, it is hardly surprising, that the feature film POPIELUSZKO (Poland 2012) about the fate of a Solidarność priest, who was murdered by the Polish secret service in 1984, met with such immense interest on part of audiences in its country of origin. By contrast, the Russian epic film THE HORDE (2012) takes its audiences far back into the fourteenth century and describes the battle of the Christian world against the Golden Horde from the point of view of the Russian Orthodox Church.
In the Balkans, ethnic and religious tensions found bloody expression most recently in the Yugoslav wars of disintegration. In 1996, Srđan Dragojević (at present represented in German cinemas with PARADA) was one of the first Serbian film makers active in the zone of war, when shooting PRETTY VILLAGE, PRETTY FLAME (Serbia 1996), a controversial milestone of Southeast European film history. Milja Radović, member of this year's ecumenical jury of the FilmFestival Cottbus, will accompany the film's screening with a lecture on the meaning and usage of national and religious symbols. The two Estonian contributions NARROW IS THE GATE and THIS IS THE DAY bear witness to the life of nuns and monks in Serbian Orthodox monasteries in Kosovo. Created in 2002 and in 2010, respectively, these two films impressively document the development of the conflict between Albanians and Serbs. Lastly, ALBANIAN CHRONICLE (Albania, France, Italy, Greece 2009), a film about the coexistence of Muslims and Christians in a South Albanian community, lets the audience of this year's >Focus< go home equipped with hope, that agreement between religions and ethnicities is possible, after all.
For the majority of the selected films, the festival screening will mark their international or German début performance. Most of the films will be personally introduced in Cottbus by their directors.
The programme series >Focus is funded by the German Fderal Agency for Civic Education. The 22nd FilmFestival Cottbus is supported and funded by, amongst others, the Ministry of Economics of the Federal State of Brandenburg, the Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH, the City of Cottbus, as well as by its First Partner, Vattenfall, and by the Media Programme of the European Union.
Save the date: The press conferences for the 22nd FilmFestival Cottbus will take place on 18 October 2012: At 11 am at the Instituto Cervantes, Rosenstr. 16-18, Berlin and at 4 pm at KOCHKULTUR, Uferstr. 1 in Cottbus. Press Relations:
Diana Kluge / Cornelia Reichel +49 (355) 43107-13 / -16 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
www.filmfestivalcottbus.de