This year’s European Film
Festival goes virtual with an excellent line-up of twelve brand new films, all
of which are premiere screenings in South Africa. Of these eleven films are
screened free of charge and one will collect a fee towards a worthy cause.
Emphasising her support for the
festival’s continuity despite the challenges presented by the coronavirus
pandemic, EU Ambassador to South Africa, Dr Riina Kionka, said: “Twelve films
in eleven days shows the determination of this European partnership to overcome
difficult circumstances. Since my arrival in South Africa this is my second
European Film Festival: I can tell you that it is a cultural highlight
not to be missed. In addition, I invite you to participate in the various
special events lined up during the Festival!”
Old Worlds and New
Invoking a moment of reflection,
and the opportunity to reset our attitude to the world and our 2020
circumstances, this year’s 7th edition of the European Film
Festival, is about Then and Now, with the films inscribing an arc from Old
Worlds to New.
Starting in the Middle Ages, this
year’s Austrian film is based on the story of Narcissus and Goldmund,
written by Nobel-prize winning author Hermann Hesse, and directed here by
Oscar-winning Stefan Ruzowitzky (The Counterfeiters). It examines the powerful
bond between two very different characters, amidst the dichotomy between
religious monastic life and the passion and adventure of secular life.
Moving forward a few hundred
years, there are two reflections on wars of the 20th century.
After World War 2, when most
countries around the world were focused on recovery and rebuilding, the small
country of Lithuania remained in a war situation as locals resisted
Soviet occupation for about another 15 years. Sharanas Bartas’s film In
The Dusk dramatically takes us into that desperate time and
place. From the same era,but focused in a different part of Europe and
Africa, Home Front is a Belgian film directed by Lucas
Belvaux, where painful memories of the time of the French colonial war in
Algeria explode into the present, opening up chapters of a toxic past which is
still not fully spoken of today.
Marco Bellocchio’s award-winning
film The Traitor takes us into the 1980s when a
whistleblowing mafia boss-turned-informer triggers the largest
prosecution of the Sicilian mafia in Italian history. A riveting insight into
the operations of one of the world’s most notorious crime syndicates.
The German film Curveball, directed
by Johannes Naber, is a thriller that catapults viewers into the 21st century.
In a sober warning about how terribly easy it is to slip into war, this is a
fact-based story about how a lie regarding chemical weapons, sets in motion a
chain of events that results in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, forever changing
the global political landscape.
On a much lighter note, the
Spanish film directed by Bernabe Rico, One Careful Owner, tells
how a woman buys a new home with a certain ‘inconvenience’, namely
that the 80-year old current owner will remain living in it until she
dies. The two very different women in this story will form an unlikely
friendship filled with tenderness, emotion and much laughter.
Another film focusing on female
relationships, and in this case a mother-daughter relationship, is the French
film Proxima, by director Alice Winocour, about a French woman
astronaut who is forced to consider her priorities of family versus
career.
There are two stories of unique
emancipation and self-discovery – the first is the Dutch film, Becoming
Mona, directed bySabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden, in
which we follow, from childhood through to adulthood, Mona’s struggle to break
free from the stifling constraints of a life lived in service of other people’s
egos. The UK film this year is Bassam Tariq’s Mogul Mowgli,
starring Riz Ahmed as a rapper on the verge of a big international tour when he
gets cut down with a severe illness, causing him to confront his
Pakistani/English culture, and himself.
The Polish film Sweat by
director Magnus van Horn focuses on a fitness motivator who has become a social
media celebrity and influencer – it’s about how she wrestles with the nature of
her popularity and what loneliness and intimacy mean in her world, all highly
pertinent issues in this modern digital era.
The festival also includes two
powerful documentaries. The Irish representative, The 8th,
is about the highly emotive and divisive topic of abortion and women’s
reproductive rights. Here, three award-winning women directors, Aideen
Kane, Lucy Kennedy, and Maeve O’Boyle, follow the grassroots activism of the
campaign to repeal the 1983 8th amendment (which criminalised
abortions) in a defining moment of Irish history.
Finally, bringing us right up to
date, is a film which focuses our attention on one of the greatest crises
humanity has ever faced, climate change. Nathan Grossman’s deeply personal
Swedish documentary I am Greta follows the teenage
climate activist Greta Thunberg from her one-person school strike to her
astonishing wind-powered voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to speak at the UN
Climate Action Summit in New York City.
“These films give us
much to think about, a common theme in all of them being Relationship,”
says Peter Rorvik, curator of the festival. “The wide range of relationships deal
with antagonism, dominance, and dependency; with competition and conflict; with
cooperation, friendship, and love; with class, race, and culture. It is
also about relationship with ourselves, and with our environment, and the
eco-systems of which we are a part. We cannot always control our circumstances,
but how we manage these exchanges will mark our place in the world. This
selection will not just entertain, but contribute to our awareness of
relationships, guide our actions, and inform our ongoing journey of discovery
of the world and ourselves.”
Free Screenings
The 2020 edition of the European
Film Festival is virtual and accessible online across South Africa only.
The film screenings are free, except for I am Greta,
whose entry fee of R50 serves as a fundraiser for a climate action group who
will be awarded screening proceeds after the festival.
Look out for the full programme
of screenings and special events on https://www.eurofilmfest.co.za/
Bringing the best of European
film to South Africa’s home screens, the European Film Festival 2020 is a
partnership project of the Delegation of the European Union to South Africa and
12 other European embassies and cultural agencies in South Africa: the
Embassies of Austria, Belgium, Ireland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland,
Spain, Sweden and Wallonie-Bruxelles International, the French Institute in
South Africa, the Goethe-Institut, the Italian Cultural Institute, and the
British Council. The festival is organised in cooperation with CineEuropa and
coordinated by Creative WorkZone.
