Panorama Europe 2018, the tenth edition of the essential festival of new and vital European cinema, co-presented by Museum of the Moving Image and the members of EUNIC (European Union National Institutes for Culture), includes fiction and documentary works that present a portrait of contemporary Europe during a period of tremendous flux. The festival, which launched in 2009 by Czech Center New York, continues to give New Yorkers an eclectic overview of the current European film scene.
Highlighting recent films from throughout the continent, several of the films explore dialogues between the historic upheavals of the twentieth century and the current moment. The programmer of this year's edition of the festival, Nellie Killian, says, "Bringing a more unified curatorial voice to the Panorama Europe line up was an interesting challenge. While the films still range in style and subject matter, representing the diversity of the various countries, there were so many opportunities to find resonances between recent films. For example, Ruth Beckerman's The Dreamed Ones and Rita Azevedo Gomes's Correspondences each take an experimental approach to the epistolary film, using letters between famed poets (Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachman from Austria and Sophia de Mello Breyner and Jorge de Sena from Portugal) to explore themes of displacement and memory. Christina Vandekerckhove's Rabotand Goran Devic's The Steel Mill Caffé observe the final days of two doomed institutions, a dilapidated public housing complex once a site of utopian aspiration and local cafe outside a now shuttered ironworks. I'm especially excited about our two repertory titles: Pavel Juracek's adaptation of Gulliver's Travels, Case for the New Hangman, which situates the Prague Spring in the realm of the surreal, and Gregory Markopoulos's The Illiac Passion, an evocation of ancient Greek culture starring the leading lights of New York's avant-garde including Jack Smith, Taylor Mead, Beverly Grant, and Andy Warhol."
The opening night selection, Barbara Visser's The End of Fear reconstructs the vandalization and subsequent obliteration through restoration of Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III. Director Visser will participate in a conversation with art writer, scholar, and strategist András Szántó, Ph.D. after the screening.
The festival will feature some of the most exciting new voices in documentary, including Anna Marziano's meditation on romantic love
BEYOND the One; Maryam Goormaghtigh's hybrid road movie Before Summer Ends; Bernadett Tuza-Ritter's intimate portrait of contemporary slavery A Woman Captured; Ziad Kalthoum's stunning, searing Taste of Cement, about Syrian migrant workers in Lebanon; and Lots of Kids, a Monkey, and a Castle by Gustavo Salmerón, a hilarious and picturesque story of a Spanish family.
Among the other titles are Miracle, Egle Vertelyte's dryly comic look back at Lithuania's Wild West post-Soviet years of the early 1990s; Silent Night, Piotr Domalewski's raw, tragicomic Christmas tale which won Best Film, Director, Script, and Actor at this year's Polish Film Awards; 5 October, by renowned photographer Martin Kollar capturing his dying brother's final cross-continental bicycle journey; Rainer Sarnet's November, a wondrously witchy, folkloric fable set in nineteenth-century Estonia, winner of the 2018 American Society of Cinematographers' Spotlight Award for cinematography; and a selection of short new films from Malta, including The Maltese Fighter, Bajtra tax-Xewk (Prickly Pear), Arcadia, and Lejliet (Eve).
Tickets for screenings at MoMI are $15 (with discounts for seniors, students, and Museum members) and free at Bohemian National Hall. Advance tickets at MoMI are available at movingimage.us; reservations for BNH tickets may be made at www.czechcenter.com. See below for full lineup and schedule or visit movingimage.us/panoramaeurope2018
Panorama Europe's tenth year coincides with the European Year of Cultural Heritage, an initiative to encourage more people to discover and engage with Europe's cultural heritage, and to reinforce a sense of belonging to a common European space. For more information, visit europa.eu/cultural-heritage/
Panorama Europe is coordinated by Gaelle Duchemin, European Union Delegation to the United Nations and in partnership with the Czech Center New York/Bohemian National Hall. The 2018 Panorama Europe Film Festival presenting partners are the Arts Council Malta in New York, the Austrian Cultural Forum New York, the Balassi Institute - Hungarian Cultural Center New York, the Consulate General of the Republic of Croatia and the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, the Consulate General of Estonia, the Consulate General of Lithuania, the Consulate General of Portugal, the Consulate General of Slovakia, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, the Czech Center New York, the Delegation of the European Union to the United Nations, Dutch Culture
USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, General Delegation of the Government of Flanders to the U.S.A., the Goethe-Institut New York, Instituto Cervantes, the Italian Cultural Institute, the Consulate General of Greece in New York and the Onassis Foundation USA, and the Polish Cultural Institute New York.
This program is supported by the EU Policy & Outreach Partnership (EU POP) of the Delegation of the European Union to the United States.
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