Last month, as the Berlinale kicked off, we wrote about the working conditions of the event and European-wide initiatives to improve the terms of employment of film festival employees. While the working conditions of festival workers remain precarious for a majority of employees, precarity disproportionally affects female employees. As the next big film festival is approaching, the issue of gender equality in the industry has once again made headlines. As reported by the collectif 50/50, a publicly funded collective promoting gender parity in the French film industry, only the Semaine de la Cr ..read more

Eastern Front is an unflinching report of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Shooting footage from the front lines, paramedic and co-director Yevhen Titarenko is the main protagonist of the documentary. A volunteer since 2014, Titarenko’s first-hand account of the horrors of war are captured through the lens of a body camera. It is a truly up-close and personal point of view, unshrinking in its portrayal of gritty, gory details and real-life tragic episodes encountered by his medical battalion on duty. Eastern Front is a perturbing feature and one that uses the harshness of its reality to expose th ..read more

During recent protests in Iran, students from both university and high school took to the streets in response to the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who had died after being taken into custody in Tehran for wearing an “improper” hijab. Despite facing police brutality, students are now taking their hijab off and walking in the streets of Teheran demanding gender equality. In Romania, too, women are in the process of finding their own voice after a long period marked by patriarchal dictatorship. In the meantime, the rights of ethnic and sexual minorities have been brough ..read more

According to the Catholic Church, those who die in God’s grace imperfectly purified have to undergo a special purification process after death so as to attain the holiness required to enter heaven and join the rest of the saved souls. For Catholics, this purgatorial process is one of suffering, a suffering of love to be precise, since those not-yet-holy souls remain in God’s favor and are guaranteed access to heaven. Still, the process is often associated with pain that is both mental (due to the absence of God) and physical (due to extreme cold or fire). To describe the nature of purgatorial ..read more

In 1940s Hungary, a haggard police inspector from the city (Péter Haumann) is called to the impenetrable fog of a mountain village to solve a disturbing case. A young girl has been found dead in the forest, causing ripples of suspicion and unease among the community. When the sole suspect commits suicide, the case is considered closed and the inspector is taken off the case, yet he refuses to let it drop and stays to investigate on his own, taking increasingly drastic measures. It’s hard to resist comparisons between György Fehér’s Twilight and Twin Peaks, especially since they both came out i ..read more

Coverage from the Crossing Europe Film Festival in Linz (April 26-May 1 ..read more

The 9th Step is a touching portrayal of seventeen-year-old Ieva and her ex-alcoholic father’s attempt at rebuilding their tenuous relationship. Inspired by the director’s own struggle with addiction, the film explores the impact of living with the disease and its repercussions on our connection with others. The shared narrative between Ieva and her father Linas is an optimistic observation in an otherwise discouraging circumstance. The 9th Step shows us how – against the odds – we can overcome our own demons to help not only ourselves but also the ones we hold dearest to our hearts. Ieva (Gerd ..read more

As the Berlinale kicked off on February 16, we are excited to provide our readers with reviews and interviews on the event’s selection of Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern European films. During the last two years, we have also used the event as an occasion to report and reflect on the precarious conditions of the festival’s employees and in particular on the festival’s absurd wage ratio, the proportion of the top salaries to those at the bottom. The economic reality of the festival continues to represent a form of institutionalized hypocrisy. While the festival prides itself for selecting f ..read more

Despite being terminally ill with lung cancer, Yugoslav author Danilo Kiš arrived in Israel in 1989 with a small film crew to shoot a documentary series with two survivors of the Cominformist purges and Yugoslav corrective labor camps, the most notorious of which were located on the Adriatic islands of Goli otok and Sveti Grgur.​1​ The documentary was Kiš’s last work before his death later that year and bookended an oeuvre that obsessively confronted manifestations of state terror and violence in the 20th century.​2​   When two Yugoslav-Israeli emigres, Ženi Lebl and Eva Panić-Nahir, appr ..read more

Coverage from the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival (February 16-26 ..read more