FASCINATING EASTERN FILM WORLDS

goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Film is growing in pace with the dynamic development of filmmaking in Eastern Europe: With their directors and producers in attendance, over 150 fiction and documentary films from as many as 20 different countries will screen during the 7 days of the festival, and so offer considerable insight into the vigorous filmmaking scene in Central and Eastern Europe. Further opportunities to learn more about the region are offered by discussion forums, film talks with directors and producers, and a comprehensive sidebar programme. New in 2008: The cinema Kino im Deutschen Filmmuseum in Frankfurt offers repeat screenings of feature films competing at the festival and other films selected from the programme.
Sergei Paradzhanov, a "magician with three motherlands", is the subject of a goEast Homage in 2008. Born in Georgia to Armenian parents, Paradzhanov received his artistic inspiration in the Ukraine and went on to become one of the most important filmmakers to emerge from the Soviet Union and at the same time the prisoner of a dictatorial system. goEast presents the unique talent of this artist and director, who died in 1990, in a retrospective. Films include THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES (USSR, 1969) and LEGEND OF SURAM FORTRESS (USSR, 1985).
In 2008, the Portrait section devoted to the generation of directors who directly experienced the period of political and social transformation in Central and Eastern Europe surveys the work of young Hungarian filmmaker Benedek Fliegauf. His feature debut FOREST gained him the Wolfgang-Staudte-Preis at the 2003 Berlin International Film Festival and the follow-on film DEALER won the award for Best Director at goEast in 2004.
The ex-Yugoslav republics, in search of specific identities and still scarred by the trauma of war, are caught up in a process of "nation (re-)building". The goEast Symposium Iconography and "Nation (Re-)Building" running from 10 to 12 April 2008 explores the way these developments have been documented on film since the 1990s. Lectures and discussions with guests from Southeast Europe and Germany will be accompanied by an extensive series of films little known in Germany.
Despite increasing success on the international circuit, Eastern European films continue to suffer from lacking distribution to a wider audience. To coincide with the opening of the 2008 Festival, goEast has cooperated with the publishing house absolut MEDIEN and, as media partner, the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper to launch the first goEast Edition with contemporary and classic works of Eastern European cinema. The first DVD includes the goEast prizewinners DEALER (Hungary, 2004, dir: Benedek Fliegauf) and KLOPKA (Serbia/Germany/Hungary, 2007, dir: Srdan Golubovic).