Rúnar Rúnarsson is acclaimed Icelandic director whose short films won numerous prestigious festivals. His feature debut Volcano, a story about grumpy old man and his reinvention, premiered at Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes in 2011. His second feature Sparrows won the Golden Shell at San Sebastián film festival and competed for the Prize for the Best Fiction Film at Bratislava IFF.
Darijan Pejovski (1983) is a young Macedonian film director. He graduated from the Department of Film and TV Directing at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Skopje. The audience knows him as a co-writer of the screenplay for a feature fiction film directed by Vladimir Blazevski, Punk´s Not Dead (Pankot ne e mrtov, 2011). Before he directed several short and documentary films. During the International Film Festival Bratislava you could have seen his first feature fiction film Three Days in September (2015). Continue reading “Darijan Pejovski: Feature film is like a marathon, short movies are more like a sprint”
Florencia Rovlich is a young director from Buenos Aires. At Bratislava IFF she presented her short film #YA (co-directed by Ygor Gama), a melange between documentary and fiction about revolutionary spirit of young generation.
Unfortunately, the Bratislava film festival is slowly heading toward the inevitable. All international juries picked the winning films in each category yesterday, so you still can hope that maybe one of them is among the listed. It is a public holiday today, which plays into the hands of movie buffs that would otherwise have to stay at work. Today, the screenings are scheduled only in Kino Lumière (K2) and Kino Mladosť. Continue reading “Our Tips for Tuesday”
Mišo Suchý is a Slovak-American filmmaker whose retrospective at this year’s edition of the Bratislava film festival was organised in cooperation with the Month of Photography exhibition cycle. His films focus primarily on the issues of family, home, identity, and separation and combine various materials including photographs and home videos.
Continue reading “Mišo Suchý: My Films Emerge from My Inner Need to Get to Grips with Things”
Hermes Paralluelo made two feature length documentary films and both were presented at Bratislava IFF: Yatasto in 2012 and Not All Is Vigil last year when it won the Best Documentary Film Award. This year he is a member of Documentary Competition Jury.
Cyril Leuthy’s The Night Is Fading is a film-journey throughout family as well as French colonial history. We spoke with film’s producer Juliette Cazanave.
Continue reading “Juliette Cazanave: It is difficult to confront yout past”
On Saturday, November 14, Bratislava International Film Festival held a gala evening to present its Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award upon actress Emília Vášáryová and make her the newest holder of the memorial tile on the Film Walk of Fame in Bratislava downtown. Continue reading “Emília Vášáryová: “I Don’t Like to Watch 35 mm Films on Television””
Experimenting with the picture format remains a relatively uncharted territory of contemporary cinema. Apart from Xavier Dolan’s Mommy (2014), it is rather difficult to recall any other such film that would score major success with the general audience. Continue reading “Our Preview: Lucifer”
Dalibor Matanić demonstrated interest in strong issues already in early stages of his career. In his latest motion picture, Zvizdan (2015), which took home Un Certain Regard Jury Prize from this year’s Cannes IFF, he deals with complicated mutual relations between Croats and Serbs. Continue reading “Zvizdan”
The cold and damp weather that set in Bratislava yesterday makes for a perfect invitation to spend your free time in a cinema theatre; here, you can tuck in a comfy armchair, forget the wind and the rain and identify with joys and problems of on-screen characters just like Mia Farrow did in the Purple Rose of Cairo. To help you fit your mood to the perfect film, here are a couple of tips for today. Continue reading “Our Tips for Monday”
Croatian screenwriter and director Zrinko Ogresta (1958) is one of the members of the Fiction Competition Jury. His films are characterized by strong visuals, well-articulated mise-en-scène and inventive storytelling. Continue reading “Zrinko Ogresta: The selection of movies of IFF Bratislava was excellent”
Like every day, we would again like to draw your attention to filmsthat are particularly worth seeing. Some of them will screen again on Monday or Tuesday but why wait? Continue reading “Our Tips for Sunday”
In 1992 when former Yugoslavia was being ravaged by a devastating civil war, the wave of refugees that had spilled all over Europe reached as far as Denmark. With existing refugee camps filled to the brim, the Red Cross came up with an ingenious solution to tug a decommissioned ocean liner into a canal near Copenhagen. Soon renamed fittingly to Flotel Europa, this floating refugee camp became a temporary home to hundreds of refugees for several months or even years. Continue reading “Our Preview: Flotel Europa”
A graduate from Prague’s FAMU originally from Slovenia, Olmo Omerzu released his Family Film at San Sebastián IFF. Continue reading “Our Preview: Family Film”
The Bratislava film festival enters the weekend at full throttle and cinemagoers can look forward to a truckload of films that are very difficult to choose from; we would like to make your decision-making easier by issuing the following movie tips. Continue reading “Our Tips for Saturday”
This year, the Bratislava film festival decided to pay homage to a little plastic item that once shaped the way we perceived films and life around us – videocassette. On the first glimpse, it may appear as an obscure episode and a marginal medium in the history of cinema; however, the VHS boom is a true phenomenon that has forever changed not only the face of the film industry (have you seen Boogie Nights?) but also life in many societies locked behind the Iron Curtain – at least that’s what young Romanian director Ilinca Calugareanu is trying to show us in her feature documentary, Chuck Norris vs Communism. Continue reading “How Videocassettes Changed the Face of Cinema, Society”
If the chief ambition of the Bratislava film festival’s “Europa” section is to bring the crème de la crème of contemporary European film production, then 13 Minutes was certainly a worthy choice.
Continue reading “13 Minutes”
One of our film festival’s principal missions is to expand cinemagoers’ horizons, bring them films they otherwise wouldn’t be able to see, point out recent trends within cinema and society and highlight them from different, preferably unexpected angles.
Continue reading “A Short Manual to the “Lexicon” Programme Section”
Even before this year’s festival officially opened its gates, Kino Mladosť screened the first festival film, Mediterranea, a feature-length debut by young Italian-American director Jonas Carpignano that tells a story of two migrants’ perilous voyage from the shores of Africa to Southern Italy.
Continue reading “17th Bratislava Film Festival Warms Up in Topical and Spectacular Fashion”
It is very simple: in order to watch any film of your choice at the festival, you must have a ticket or a Festival Pass.