[ Film Festivals ]

There are several international film festivals scheduled for this week in Bitola (Macedonia), in Zagreb (Croatia) and in Vienna (Austria), which are defintively worth visiting ...

The 26th Manaki Brothers Film Camera Festival started today in Bitola and will last until September 25th. The Film camera "Magician", Italian Vittorio Storaro, who is a three-time winner of the Academy Award for "Apocalypse Now", "Red" and "The Last Emperor", will hold a seminar on the topic "Light, Colours, and Forms" within the festival. Besides the selection of the main competition programme, the festival includes a selection of short film and student programmes. The special selection, Balkanika, is in honour to 100 years of film in the Balkans. Another special selection, Bioscope, will show Macedonian films. The official competition includes furthermore the hungarian masterpiece "Fateless" (2005) directed by Lajos Koltai based on the novel by the great hungarian author Imre Kertész.

The 25 FPS Festival will present short experimental films and videos, as well as experimental-animation hybrids from 21.9. to 25.9.2005 in Zagreb. The programme includes an interesting retrospective on Croatian Short Films from the sixties and seventies, it will also come up with short specials from Slovenia and Poland and will offer a lecture about Pioneer Experimental Film in Croatia. (See also the Zagreb-Weblog)

Don´t miss the film SUMMER IN THE GOLDEN VALLEY / LJETO U ZLATNOJ DOLINI by Srdjan Vuletić (Bosnia and Herzegovina/Austria/France/UK 2003), which is to be screened on September 28th, 20:00 and September 29th, 16:00 at the competitive GAFFA Film Festival for Young People in Vienna, which takes place from 23.9. to 30.9.2005!

Synopsis:
Fikret Varuba would have been a completely ordinary sixteen-year old boy from Sarajevo, if an unusual incident wouldn´t have happend to him. At the "Dzhenasia" (traditional Muslim funeral) of his father, he finds out that his father was deeply in debt with Hamid, a man whom Fikret has not known nor seen until now. The amount is high and Hamed demands at the funeral that Fikret should pay his father's debt. This means great shame for the family and they become a target of public contempt. Therefore, Fikret, although merely a child, decides to "buy back" his father's soul. To return the money and secure "halal" (redemption) for his father, he keeps his dignity and sets out to the real world of Sarajevo - a world ruled by post-war chaos, corruption, misery and terrible poverty.