18/04/2012 - The Central and Eastern European film festival will open tonight in the spa town of Wiesbaden with the screening of Bohdan Sláma’s new film.

The 12th goEast Film Festival kicks off today at the Caligari-FilmBühne in Wiesbaden, one of Germany’s most beautiful cinemas, and will continue until April 24. As has been custom since the festival was first founded by Claudia Dillmann, now president of the German Film Institute, the event is again headed by a woman, Gaby Babic, as both director and artistic director of the festival for the second year in a row since her arrival. The event, which follows on from an East European Week held until the 1980s to give people from West Germany an idea of what was happening on the other side of the Iron Curtain, has for 12 years aimed at fuelling real dialogue, not only between Eastern and Western Europe through a young generation of directors, but also between professionals and the public, as well as professors and students.

goEast will open to the amused and ironic tone of Four Suns (photo) by Czech director Bohdan Sláma (Country Teacher [+see also:
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Four Suns is one of the ten fiction features and six documentaries selected for the festival’s competition, from among which an international jury headed by Romanian director Cristi Puiu will choose the winners of four awards (total value of €29,500) and the FIPRESCI Award. Other contenders include European co-production Practical Guide to Belgrade With Singing and Crying by Serbian filmmaker Bojan Vuletić, made up of four promisingly entertaining episodes, 2011 Cannes contender Avé [+see also:
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Besides the student competition, special sections to stimulate discussion, meetings for young professionals, and an exhaustive symposium on Lenfilm, the very first Soviet film studio, a programme on the theme of revolt will bring together classics (including the Man of Iron by Andrzej Wajda) and other recent titles. The Highlights section will gives the public the occasion to discover unmissable productions, like Czech director Václav Havel’s Leaving, while the Hommage section will retrace the work of Russian director Sergei Loznitsa, who became famous worldwide in 2010 for the violent My Joy [+see also:
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(Translated from French)