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    8th goEast – Festival of Central & East European Film 2008

    By Martin Blaney | July 1, 2008

    Estonia was a double winner at the 8th goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Film in Wiesbaden (9-15 April 2008), with Kadri Kousaar’s feature debut Magnus awarded the Golden Lily for Best Film and the FIPRESCI Critics Prize. The international jury, headed by German producer Eberhard Junkersdorf, praised the film for “its depiction of a youngster’s quest for stability in a society unable to provide him with firm ground to stand on.”

    Serbian filmmaker Stefan Arsenijevic followed his triumph at the recent Sofia festival with another Best Director Award at Wiesbaden for his feature debut Ljubav i drugi zlocini (Love And Other Crimes). The German Foreign Office Award for a film whose “artistic originality creates cultural diversity” went to Ukrainian director Eva Nejman’s debut feature U reki (At The River), about a walk along a river bank with an 84-year old mother and her 60-year old daughter. The new Remembrance and Future Documentary Award went to Romanian filmmaker Thomas Ciulei for Podul di flori (The Flower Bridge), about a family’s life in a small village in Moldova. And Honorary Mentions were given to the actors in Alexei Popogrebsky’s Prostye vesci (Simple Things) and to Andrei Paunov’s documentary Problemat s komarite i drugi istorii (The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories).

    This year’s fest – with more than 9,500 attending 150 screenings and sidebar events – included a six-film homage and photo exhibition dedicated to The World of Sergei Parajanov – Art Without Borders, with his nephew Georgi and Zaven Sargsyan (director of Parajanov Museum in Yerevan) present, plus a symposium addressing Iconography and Nation (Re-)Building: Documentaries from Ex-Yugoslav Region. Also, the festival launched a new DVD label, goEast Edition, created with distributor absolut Medien and the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, to provide wider circulation for films from Central and Eastern Europe. Among the first titles were two previous goEast prize-winners: Benedek Fliegauf’s Dealer and Srdjan Golubovic’s Klopka (The Trap).

    – Martin Blaney

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