East feast

>> Dictators, dancing bears, puppets
and more at EUROfEST, a new festival
of Eastern European cinema

by MATTHEW HAYS

Organizers of the first annual EUROfEST have correctly noted that there is a dearth of subtitled films at our cinemas. What with film distribution falling into the hands of fewer and fewer companies, it has become that much harder to see cinema from other parts of the world. The fledgling EUROfEST is an effort to highlight the films of Eastern Europe, and to grant Montrealers the chance to see movies that would otherwise not screen here.

EUROfEST ’07 kicks off with The Way I Spent the End of the World, Catalin Mitulescu’s moving film about how a family’s life is changed in the final year of Ceausescu’s dictatorship, 1989. A teenage girl and her boyfriend accidentally smash the bust of the brutal dictator, but must pay for such an act of brazen disrespect. She is shipped off to reform school, where she meets a new love and they plan their escape from then-fascist Romania. Her seven-year-old kid brother, meanwhile, plots to kill Ceausescu. An unusual and touching film about the effects of living under totalitarian rule.

In the Bulgarian-German coproduction Christmas Tree Upside Down, a giant tree is chopped down and dragged across the wintry terrain to be raised and decorated in a town square. Directors Ivan Cherkelov and Vassil Jivkov show us a wide range of emotions and situations facing a diverse group of people—from tragedy to trauma to celebration—in six different sub-plots, all connected in some way to the tree. The Swiss-Romanian copro Ryna shows us the life of one young woman, struggling to live her life freely while under the vicious tutelage of her father, a violent and unforgiving mechanic.

In Famine ’33, director Oles Yanchuk depicts details of the human effects of Stalin’s deliberate Ukrainian famine-genocide of 1932–33. An estimated 7 million Ukrainians died as a result of starvation, and this catastrophe is brought to life through Yanchuk’s epic filmmaking, based on the Vasyl Barka novel The Yellow Prince. This historical event will also be explored in the Canadian documentary Harvest of Despair, in which directors Slavko Novytski and Yurij Luhovy conduct in-depth interviews with eyewitnesses of the famine-genocide.

Puppet enthusiasts will want to check out One Night in One Town, Jan Balej’s feature from the Czech Republic. This adult-oriented animated film has its characters face a series of bizarre scenarios in one night in a twisted town. Another documentary entry is the Bulgarian

Dancing Bear Park by Eldora Traykova. In Bulgaria, gypsies used to hold licences to keep dancing bears, until animal rights activists started an international protest to stop the cruel practice. A dancing bear park was created as a place for the dancing bears to retire to; this film shows us where they now live, and also looks at the lives of their former wards, the gypsies, who are now left without a livelihood.

EUROfEST runs from this Friday,
May 25 until June 2, at the Cinéma du Parc.

Info: www.cinemaduparc.com

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