Opening night – Celebrating new EU members from South East Europe

L’s REBELLION 
(Bulgaria, 2006, Feature; 106 min. US Premiere!)

Director: Kiran Kolarov
Box office blockbuster in Bulgaria, “L’s REBELLION" will have its North American debut at the festival. The film tells a heart-breaking story of a young rebel, Loris (Deyan Slavchev in a career-making role), who tries to escape to the West in 1986, only to be released after the fall of the Berlin Wall into a society ripped apart by organized crime and robber-baron style capitalism.

[Buy tickets for SEE Film Festival/L’s REBELLION]

The WAY I SPENT the END of the WORLD
(Romania, 2006, Feature; 105 min.)

Director: Catalin Mitulescu
Winner of Best Actress award for Dorotheea Petre at Cannes Film Festival’s “Un Certain Regard” in 2006, “The Way I Spent the End of the World” is a warm-hearted coming-of-age story of two siblings making the most of it in the last months of Ceausescu’s regime in Romania. Brilliantly acted by the pitch-perfect Dorotheea Petre (“Ryna”), and young boy Timotei Duma, the film follows them through the pains of first love and challenged loyalties.

[Buy tickets for SEE Film Festival/End of the world]

TWO GIRLS
(Turkey, 2005, Feature; 107 min. US Premiere!)

Director: Kutlug Ataman
Based on Perihan Magden's controversial best-selling novel, the film follows two firebrand rebel-teenagers roaming the city of Istanbul. One, the model-pretty blonde, Handan, loves shopping malls. She also has a love-hate relationship with her mom, Leman, who is willing to turn tricks to raise Handan's college fees. The other, Behiye, is an angry and defiant university student who despises her conservative parents and her abusive older brother. Despite the differences in their backgrounds, these two girls embark on an intense relationship and, with it, a secret plan to escape their dysfunctional families. No small feature of the film is a terrific score by the Replikas (featured in Crossing the Bridge).

[Buy tickets for SEE Film Festival/Two Girls]
 

8:30 pm

BINKA 
(Bulgaria, 2006, Documentary; 48 min. West Coast Premiere!)

Director: Elka Nikolova
Bulgarian director Binka Zhelyazkova (b. 1923) never shrank from controversy. Educated at Moscow’s prestigious film academy, she clashed with Bulgaria’s commissars and was at the forefront of political cinema under the country’s Communist regime. Intense and passionate about moviemaking as much as about her view of the society she lived in, Binka was ahead of her time. This documentary brings to light the woman behind the camera, and combines scenes from Binka’s films, rare archival footage, and candid interviews with former Bulgarian studio executives and film professionals. Her allegorical and urban dramas examined human rights, artistic freedom and the legitimacy of the political system itself.

[Buy tickets for SEE Film Festival/Binka]

A KISS ON THE NOSE
(Greece/USA/Italy, 2005, Short feature; 14 min.)

Director: Laura Neri
Lyrical examination of a mixed Greek-Italian marriage from the daughter’s point of view…..After Chiara's distant Italian father Romano dies, she tries to come to terms with her own feelings about him, but also about her mixed heritage. Telling Chiara’s story in reverse, the filmmaker takes us on a journey back in time, to her parents' birth and their first encounter. From fragments of memory and often whimsical reconstructions of events that Chiara did not actually witness, little by little a picture emerges ...

SVETLANA’S JOURNEY 
(Bulgaria/USA, 2005, Documentary; 40 min.)

Director: Michael Cory Davis
Based on a true story, the film reveals atrocities of child slave trade, one of the most painful aspects of the human trafficking. Filmed on location in Bulgaria by American filmmaker, Michael Cory Davis, in association with the Bulgarian anti-trafficking women’s organization, Face To Face, the film takes an unflinching look at sex slavery and young girls that fall prey to it. Played by 17-year old Violeta Markovska, Svetlana is a portrait in despair, but also courage and defiance.

[Buy tickets for SEE Film Festival/Svetlanas Journey]

GRAVEHOPPING
(Slovenia/Croatia, 2005, Feature; 102 min. US Premiere!)

Director: Jan Cvitkovic
Funeral orator Pero, his mute sister, her besotted car-mechanic boyfriend, the suicidal widower father, and various other relatives, onlookers and passers-by are the collective protagonists of this rural chronicle of love, family, mortality and shattering violence. Making smooth transitions between comic and tragic moods, director Cvitkovic gradually elevates what had previously been something of a raucous-Balkan-comedy-by-numbers to a higher plane. Its cumulative appeal is as dark, warm and enticing as a Slovenian summer's night.

[Buy tickets for SEE Film Festival/Gravehopping]
 

KUKUMI
(Kosovo/UN, 2005, Feature; 107 min.)

Director: Isa Qosja
Historically the first film to fly the label of Kosovo, which is now a United Nations Mission, Isa Qosja's "The Kukum" is a metaphoric tale about three inmates from a mental asylum who wander through the countryside alongside rumbling NATO tanks. Visual aesthetics and a slow, stately rhythm build a wrenching vision of post-1999 Kosovo. Director Qosja offers viewers disturbingly pessimistic reflection on the meaning of freedom, breathtaking beauty of his carefully composed shots, and lyrically surreal atmosphere, at the same time bringing a piercing sense of lost opportunity to the historical moment his film metaphorically depicts.

[Buy tickets for SEE Film Festival/Kukumi]

The New Lost Generation

MUM ‘N’ DAD
( Bosnia Herzegovina, 2006, Feature; 65 min. US Premiere!)

Director: Faruk Loncarevic
“This film is a story of an elderly couple – the husband suffers a stroke, and the wife uses that to pay him back for fifty years of life of deceit, stubbornness, violence and everything else that happens ’behind closed doors’. This need to show their intimacy dictated the form, i.e. the reality-show style, as notoriously voyeuristic. Our heroes are closed inside the box, they cannot get out, but unlike what we normally see in such programs, they are not young, pretty, ambitious and ready for any kind of romantic adventure. They are, in fact, real people, our parents, our grandparents, maybe even ourselves, people whose foundations are slipping….” (from director’s statement)

[Buy tickets for SEE Film Festival/MomnDad]

SNOWDROPS
(Albania, 2006, Short feature; 25 min US Premiere!)

Director: Robert Budina
Blessed with two fantastic actors, the luminous Rajmonda Bulku and extraordinarily powerful minimalist Edmond Budina, the film is a beautiful etude on lonely parents whose children have gone to the West in pursuit of a better life and, perhaps, happiness. Director Budina’s moving tale of a husband’s losing effort to raise the money to secure for his ailing wife a life-saving operation abroad unfolds with very few words spoken, and volumes of moviemaking magic.

[Buy tickets for SEE Film Festival/Snowdrops]

CHICKEN ELECTIONS
(Serbia, 2005, Documentary; 28 min.)

Director: Goran Radovanovic
Film about contemporary social life in the rural Balkans, solitude and depopulation. Shifting from the official launch of the first mobile phone network to war and election weary Serbia nine years later, the story centers on the local traffic cop and his grandmother, a lonely, old and ailing peasant woman. He gives her a mobile phone and impatiently tries to teach her how it works. For her ailments, she goes to see a doctor, who cheers her up by singing to her. Everything is set against the backdrop of snap elections, for which a man on a scooter delivers ballots, while fuddled men in a local pub endlessly complain, without much hope that something might actually change..

[Buy tickets for SEE Film Festival/chicken election]

GAS
(Greece, 2006, short feature; 20 min. US Premiere!)

Director: Bujar Alimani
“The father is unemployed. His son is sick. Outside it is cold”. The sum of one life is also a statement about the state of mind which is not only unique to individuals and families in South East Europe….

PAYCHECK
(Bosnia Herzegovina, 2005, short feature; 13 min. West Coast Premiere!)

Director: Alen Drljevic
Not far from Sarajevo an illegal betting shop has been set up - taking bets on the life or death of men riding a motorbike through a minefield. Muris, one of the motorcyclists, comes out of his deadly ride alive. His hungry family celebrates his first "paycheck", not knowing the truth of how he earned it…….

 

CARNIVAL
(Bosnia Herzegovina, 2006, Documentary; 70 min. West Coast Premiere!)

Director: Alen Drljevic
During the spring of 1992, fleeing from the horrors of the war, large numbers of refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina sought refuge in neighboring Montenegro. But they didn’t find the shelter they had been searching for… Journalist, Seki Radoncic, investigates what happened to those people in director Alen Drljevic’s second film.

[Buy tickets for SEE Film Festival/Carnival]

IN THE NAME OF THE SON
(US/Bosnia Herzegovina/India,  2007; short drama; 25min )

7 ½
(Serbia  2006; Feature; 110 min US Premiere!)

Director: Miroslav Momcilovic
Riotous and funny tour-de-force take on seven deadly sins committed by ordinary people in a generic-looking nondescript urban setting. Miroslav Momcilovic’s treatment of the subject combines drama and comedy in a superb summation of society in modern Serbia. The film presents seven stories, each representing a deadly sin. Main characters from one film will make a small appearance in another, and so the whole gives the sense of a living, breathing place. The stories eventually combine in a final scene of great emotion, full of pain, yet hope for the future. No story is purely comic, and yet even the darkest situations have a flare of humor. In the tradition of Kieslowski’s explorations of complexities facing contemporary men and women struggling (or not) with moral choices they make, 7 ½ delivers a wonderful fresh perspective on age-old issues.
 

[Buy tickets for SEE Film Festival/71/2]

Exclusive presentation of works-in-progress and experimental films from filmmakers of South East European descent who live and work in Los Angeles and Southern California. This unique program will also feature clips, trailers and shorts from films made by American directors about South East Europe, or about issues such as human trafficking. Please ask one of our volunteers to help you navigate the kiosks.
 

ANGELS OF SUDJERAC
by Kate Foley (Croatia/USA)

CARGO (trailer),
by Michael Cory Davis (USA/Bulgaria)

COLLISION
By Darko Ibrahimpasic (Bosnia Herzegovina/USA)

CUBE 1963
By Vedran Residbegovic (Bosnia Herzegovina/USA)

FIGHTING AUDITIONS
by Laura Neri (Greece/USA/Italy)

MAROX
by Julija Naskova (Macedonia/USA)

WIRDIV
by Julija Naskova (Macedonia/USA)