FESTIVAL Lithuania
Over 60 films at Vilnius’s Spring Festival
by Annika Pham
05/04/2006 - One of the biggest film events in Lithuania, the Kinopavasaris, or Spring of Cinema International Film Festival, held in Vilnius, has been in full speed since opening on March 24. Over 60 recent international feature films – including 29 European films – are taking part of this high profile film event supported by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture and the French, Italian, German and British Cultural Centres and embassies, among others.
The festival was originally created in 1995 under the auspices of the German and French embassies in Vilnius, which wanted to increase the visibility of their domestic films and the presence of European and non-Hollywood cinema on Lithuanian screens. Since then, the number of films screening at the festival has increased steadily every year and the event itself, under the aegis of Vida Ramaskiene, now plays a key role as a testing ground for Lithuanian distributors willing to take a risk on non-Hollywood titles.
Twenty-nine recent European films are screening this year, of which nine are French productions and co-productions, including The Child [trailer, film focus], Go, See and Become [trailer, film focus], Merry Christmas: Joyeux Noel [trailer, film focus] and Hidden [trailer, film focus]. There are also Italian titles (L’estate di mio fratello, La Febbre [trailer], The Tiger and the Snow [trailer]), German (Sophie Scholl: The Final Days [trailer]), Danish (Allegro [trailer] and Adam’s Apples [trailer, film focus]), Finnish (Mother of Mine, and the Argentinian/Spanish El Metodo and Iluminados por el fuego.
The programme also includes nine feature films from Asia, two films from Australia, 13 films from North and South America, two films from Africa and seven Lithuanian documentaries.
The festival closes on April 7 with the screening of Heaven’s Doors, the eye-catching directorial debut by Moroccan/Spanish directors Swel and Imad Noury that screened in Berlin’s Panorama section last February.
