Autumn is a great season for festivals, so let’s have a look at those happening: one of the greats and a fresh one. With a feature bonus, a theatrical release that fits in this cinematic take on social, historical, and political themes – past, present, and future.
Sibiu’s Astra Film Festival has been consistently great over decades, with its strong anthropological focus. It features both established documentaries and smaller, world cinema productions on the most individual, particular of topics. Programmes are grouped by the most urgent of topics (fake news, the online space, neo-fascism, identity) and I was happy to find some of my year’s favourites. In Farah Kassem’s We Are Inside, the director returns to her home town of Tripoli in northern Lebanon to take care of her father, a poet. Farah decides to write poetry herself in an attempt to find a closer common language. Mustapha Kassem is a fantastic protagonist, charming, playful, utterly stubborn. A beautiful, wise film, weaving the personal with the city in constant political turmoil, and uplifting in its view of art as healing and building community.
In Fiume o morte! director Igor Bezinović’ also turns to his home town for a past episode so strange it has to be real. The place is the Croatian town of Rijeka has a multicultural background and the Italian name of Fiume (hence the title: Italian for “Fiume or death”, a quote from the time). In 1919, famous Italian poet and army officer Gabriele D’Annunzio decided to occupy it and turn it into a protofascist state with him as a ruler. The occupation lasted 15 months. The hybrid pic is a high-energy, irreverent mix of archive footage and staged scenes, very funny, mischievous, and showing, depicting fascism as most ridiculous.
In Letters from Wolf Street, the director Arjun Talwar does not return to his home town but tries to learn more about his chosen one. An Indian filmmaker who picked Warsaw for his studies and remained, Talwar talks to the people he meets on his street (the postman, people in shops) to learn more about what it means to be Polish, and what it means to be a foreigner in Poland. A thoughtful, moving and witty film that is so, so universal in scope.
Among the Romanian entries, I am happy to see Andra McMasters’ Bright Future/ Viitor luminous travel more with its spectacular subject: footage shot by a member of an amateur film club at a world student festival in Pyongyang, North Korea, in 1989, where Romania sent a mixed delegation. Edited with intelligence and playfulness, this is a treat.
The festival is happening until Sunday, 26 October, and then it will make a part of its selection available online (26 October to 6 November).
Tudor Giurgiu’s The Spruce Forest/ Pădurea de molizi looks at the 1941 massacre at Fântâna Albă in Northern Bukovina, when Romanians were murdered by the Russian army while trying to cross the border from Soviet Union into Romania (today Ukrainian territory). An episode little known in public conscience with so many of the facts still disputed (like the number of victims). And I am afraid this film does not help understand it better, whether the past and the discussion in the present. Giurgiu relies on real testimonies of a man and a woman but recreates them with professional actors. It is a hybrid, metafictional setup that can work well if done with care and a comprehensible method that dissects, reflects on, and shows its topic from new angles (see again Fiume o morte!) but here I was left utterly confused. The episode is so tragic that interweaving it with funny banter between the fictional characters of actress and director putting on a performance based on the events left a bitter taste. I would go as far as call it inappropriate. This is just one example. Here is another: whenever I was immersed in the historical footage (archive photographs, for instance), I was thrown out of it by another fictional part that felt disjointed. I have so many questions about choices made by the filmmakers and mostly about the refusal to delve more into the context and how we relate to it now. A welcome take on Romanian history but such a bewildering approach.
Moving on with more enthusiasm, this time to Brașov. The city does not boast as many fests as other cities, and those existing are sort of on-the-nose for a town popular for winter and mountain sports and less for its culture. I am from Brașov and I know it’s not easy to make more contemporary, diverse, or experimental initiatives popular here, for reasons that I can only suspect (a decades-long emphasis and investment in industry and seasonal tourism over cultural strategies, a less present and active student community than in Cluj or Sibiu, for instance). So it is a good approach to try mix it up culturally and attract an audience with ‘logical’ content: a festival dedicated to horror and genre (Dracula) and mountains (Alpin). Culmea Film and Environmental Education Festival takes this further and engages intensely with its young audience for environmental education. I am thrilled! The selection includes features and shorts, fictional and documentary, many animations, but also more experimental fare (like Theos Panagopoulos’s beautiful archive essay short The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing). Screenings, discussions, and interactive projects are happening at cinema Modern in Brașov but also outside of the city in collaboration with NGOs, in nearby communities struggling with universal access to education, school dropout, and poverty (in Augustin and Sânpetru). Culmea is happening until Sunday.
By Ioana Moldovan, columnist, ioana.moldovan@romania-insider.com
(Photo info & source: Culmea screening in Augustin, courtesy of & picture credit: Culmea Facebook page)
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