The best of Central Eastern European cinema is making its return in digital form, on account of the ongoing health crisis, by way of the 32nd Trieste Film Festival which will run 21 – 30 January. The 50+ titles selected for the event directed by Fabrizio Grosoli and Nicoletta Romeo will be available to view on the MyMovies platform. This particular edition of the festival was supposed to revolve around the thirty-year anniversary of the Balkan Wars (1991/2021), “a project we’d been working on for years”, the artistic directors explain. But the pandemic has forced the festival to postpone this focus, “because many of the films we would have wanted to screen only exist in 35mm copies, which are impossible to screen in online festivals. Consequently, the tribute has been postponed (only to the spring, we hope), but we nonetheless felt it right to include two symbolic moments in such an important anniversary edition.” Indeed, it will be the film Underground which opens this year’s festival, an anarchic and surreal tale on the dissolution of Yugoslavia by Emir Kusturica, who won Cannes’ Palme d’Or in 1995, while another great work is scheduled to close the event: Ulysses’ Gaze by Theo Angelopoulos, who won the Grand Prize during that same year at Cannes.

The core of the festival programme is composed of three international competitions dedicated to features films, shorts and documentaries. Thirteen titles will grace the Feature Film Competition (whose jury is composed of director Adina Pintilie, producer Ewa Puszczyńska and programmer-film critic Paolo Bertolin), including two stories on the topic of paternity in the form of Serbian work Father [+lire aussi :
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interview : Srdan Golubović
fiche film] by Srdan Golubović (which scooped the Audience Award in the most recent Berlinale’s Panorama line-up) and Andromeda Galaxy [+lire aussi :
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interview : More Raça
fiche film] by More Raça, set in Kosovo. Formerly screened in Sundance, Visar Morina’s Exile [+lire aussi :
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interview : Visar Morina
fiche film] also moves between Kosovo and Germany, while Piotr Domalewski’s I Never Cry [+lire aussi :
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interview : Piotr Domalewski
fiche film] unfolds between Poland and Ireland and shines a realistic light on the difficulties faced by families separated by emigration.

Likewise examining the theme of immigration is Bulgarian film Fear [+lire aussi :
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interview : Ivaylo Hristov
fiche film] by Ivaylo Hristov, a drama which morphs into a comedy about a woman who is prepared to do battle with her entire village in order to welcome a migrant into her home. From modern-day Europe we move to that of the immediate post-war period in Andrej Smirnov’s A Frenchman, which explores Moscow in 1957, as seen through the eyes of a French student, and in Šarūnas Bartas’s In the Dusk [+lire aussi :
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interview : Sharunas Bartas
fiche film], which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival and presented in a world premiere in San Sebastian. Arriving from Greece we find Pari [+lire aussi :
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interview : Siamak Etemadi
fiche film] by Siamak Etemadi, which sees an Iranian mother combing the streets of Athens in search of her student son, while Romania offers up the satirical comedy The Campaign [+lire aussi :
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interview : Marian Crişan
fiche film] by Marian Crișan, in which a politician chases votes to obtain a seat in Strasbourg. Serbian film My Morning Laughter [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] by Marko Đorđević tells of a thirty-year-old’s much belated coming of age, while two of the most surprising works from last year also feature on the agenda: Polish title Sweat [+lire aussi :
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interview : Magnus von Horn
fiche film] by Magnus von Horn, which was also selected for Cannes and follows three days in the life of a “fitness-influencer”, and Georgian work Beginning [+lire aussi :
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interview : Dea Kulumbegashvili
fiche film] by Dea Kulumbegashvili, which was selected for Cannes and triumphed in San Sebastian, telling the tale of female Jehovah’s Witness Yana who is attacked by an extremist group. Last but not least in this showcase, we find Faruk Lončarević’s film So She Doesn't Live [+lire aussi :
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fiche film], which shines a light on the most heinous case of homicide in post-war Bosnia, not to mention a Special Screening, out of competition, for Azerbaijani film In Between Dying [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] by Hilal Baydarov, whose name also appears in the documentary competition line-up alongside Nails in My Brain.

Ten titles will battle it out in the Documentary Competition: Acasă, My Home [+lire aussi :
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interview : Radu Ciorniciuc
fiche film] by Romania’s Radu Ciorniciuc, which was honoured in Sundance; Armenian film  Blockade by Hakob Melkonyan; two titles from Croatia: Landscape Zero [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] by Bruno Pavić and Once Upon a Youth [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] by Ivan Ramljak; from Russia Town of Glory [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] by Dmitrij Bogolyubov; German offering Garage People [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] by Natal’ja Jefimkina; from Austria Please Hold the Line [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] by Pavel Cuzuioc; Romania’s Holy Father [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] by Andrei Dăscălescu; Lithuania’s Gentle Warriors [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] by Marija Stonytė, and the afore-mentioned Nails in My Brain.

Two new sections will bolster the festival’s traditional array of competitions: Off the Beaten…Screens, which is dedicated to new cinematographic forms, and Wild Roses: Directors in Europe, while five directors are set to “attend” the event (and take part in a panel discussion), albeit online, namely Hanna Polak with Something Better To Come [+lire aussi :
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fiche film], Agnieszka Smoczyńska with The Lure [+lire aussi :
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interview : Agnieszka Smoczyńska
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fiche film], Anna Jadowska with Wild Roses [+lire aussi :
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interview : Anna Jadowska
fiche film] and Jagoda Szelc with Tower. A Bright Day [+lire aussi :
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interview : Jagoda Szelc
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