10/02/2010

"I woke up this morning because I forgot to die,” says a young Hungarian woman to a man she’s just met in a park, after a relationship that’s ended abruptly. Previously there was aimless wandering, between a past that leaves indelible marks and a present that cannot translate these marks that reference the Holocaust, nationalism, communism or banal love stories. Segments of live are traced in Europa, East by Anita Doron, who was born in the Zakarpattia Oblast of the Ukraine and emigrated to Canada. Who with a few hundred euros and the help of her cousin, an actress for a day, shows us contemporary Hungary.

Susa, a 12-year-old Georgian boy who’s grown up too quickly and is forced to work in an illegal vodka factory, hopes that sooner or later his father will return so that he can go back to being a boy. His father does return, but his yearned-for escape remains out of reach. Rusudan Pirveli, the director of Susa, who studied Japanese language and literature and later cinema, is one of the few representatives of Georgian cinema, but her story goes beyond, because the desire for the life one would like to lead against the obligations of the life one must lead, is our eternal contradiction.

These are just two examples of the Eastern European films seen this year at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Stories in which fiction is a way to re-order the documentation of reality, and the characters are often played by non-professional actors similar to the protagonists they incarnate.

Above all Serbian director Zelimir Zilnik’s The Old School of Capitalism, a political documentary and over-the-top comedy with men that are halfway between being robbed workers and actors who depict the stubborn search for redemption, for justice that seems to have abandoned them and us.

These are small, indefeasible virtues of a cinema that observes the present and reformulates it into a story that is living material, dynamic, without a perimeter, created to host our imagination.