04/11/2010

As every year since 1991, East Germany is hosting the Cottbus Eastern European Film Festival, which opened on Tuesday with a screening of Srdjan Koljevic’s German/Serbian film The Woman with a Broken Nose [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and will close on November 7.

Ten features are vying for honours in the main competition, including Ágnes Kocsis’s Adrienn Pál [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Agnes Kocsis, director of P…
film profile] (selected at Cannes); Serbian titles Tilva Rosh by Nikola Lezaic and White White World [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Oleg Novkovic; Bogdan George Apetri’s Austrian/Romanian co-production Outskirts [+see also:
trailer
interview: Ana Ularu
film profile], which has just received the FIPRESCI Prize at the Viennale; Polish director Pawel Sala’s Mother Teresa of Cats; Petr Jákl’s Czech film Kajinek [+see also:
trailer
film profile]; The Temptation of St. Tony [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Estonia’s Veiko Öunpuu; and Aktan Arym Kubat’s Dutch/German/French/Kyrgyzstani co-production The Light Thief.

Besides the special screenings (including rabbit adventure film Esterhazy by Izabella Plucinska and The North of Calabria by Poland’s Marcin Sauter), the Spectrum sidebar continues to offer a handful of international productions, like Womb [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by established Hungarian auteur Benedek Fliegauf and Czech thriller Walking Too Fast [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Radim Spacek
film profile] by Radim Spacek.

Among its traditional sections, Cottbus will also offer a selection of domestic hits; a children’s film section; a "Focus" dedicated this year not to a particular country but to Eastern European cinema’s relationship with the rest of the world; and a retrospective which aims to compare the work of two German film schools, one located in the East (the “Konrad Wolf” School in Potsdam-Babelsberg) and the other in the West (Berlin’s dffb).

The "Polish Horizons" section focuses on avant-garde films from Germany’s neighbouring country (highlights include Jan Jakub Kolski’s Venice). Meanwhile, the German/Polish competition, comprising films aimed at 14-18 year-olds and judged by a youth jury with equal representation from both countries, has now become a permanent fixture in the Cottbus line-up.

Finally, industry professionals can get together at the East-West co-production market Connecting Cottbus.