29/07/2009

Two European countries take pride of place at the 9th Era New Horizons Film Festival in Wroclaw (July 23-August 2): a large part of the programme is devoted to Swedish films and audiences will also be able to discover Hungarian cinema.

Films from these two countries rarely make it into Polish theatres. To fill this gap, festival organisers have thus programmed two major sections.

The New Swedish Cinema section (films made in 2008 and 2009) will present 11 features (including Involuntary [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Erik Hemmendorff
interview: Ruben Östlund
film profile], The King of Ping Pong), a series of 13 shorts, films about Ingmar Bergman and children’s titles.

This section’s special guest is Jan Troell, who is the subject of a retrospective including his earlier works The Emigrants (1971), The New Land (1972) and Hamsun (1996), as well as recent productions, Tune (2007) and Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moment (2008, Golden Globes nominee and winner of the Guldbagge Award 2008). The Troell retrospective is accompanied by a series of shorts he worked on between 1966 and 2008.

Sweden’s presence at Wroclaw also has a professional purpose, for the festival is hosting the Swedish/Polish Co-production Forum, a platform for meetings between representatives from the Swedish and Polish film industries. This event enables participants to present new productions from Poland and Sweden, establish contacts with other professionals and explore opportunities for co-production, sales and distribution in the two countries.

Hungarian films from the 1960s and 1970s are the focus of "The Golden Age of Hungarian Cinema". This section includes 20 titles that reflect the development of Hungarian cinema as representative of the great transformation undergone by central and eastern European cinema at the time.

There will be a special presentation about the famous Bela Balázs Studios, which were founded in 1958 as a cine-club for film students, screenwriters and critics, before becoming a production centre in 1961. Polish viewers will have the chance to discover 14 films made by the studios. The retrospective is accompanied by the special publication of a monograph: Złota Era Węgierskiego Kina. Lata 60. i 70 ("The Golden Age of Hungarian Cinema. The 1960s and 1970s"), by Robert Kardzis and Jan Topolski.

(Translated from French)