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.
At 16.00, Kino Mladosť will present a competitive fiction feature, Wednesday, May 9 (Chaharshanbeh, 19 Ordibehesht), a feature-length debut by Iranian director Vahid Jalilvand. The main character, Jalal, publishes an unusual advertisement in one of Tehran’s morning papers, offering to donate ten thousand U.S. dollars to a needy person. By the end of the day, he intends to choose one randomly. The news creates a furore and attracts a large crowd of people in front of Jalal’s house. The police are forced to take charge of the situation and call on the applicants to calm down or else they will be dispersed; however, two women refuse to give up the attractive jackpot: Setareh, a 19-year-old pregnant woman, and Leila, Jalal’s ex-fiancé…
In the same time slot starting at 16.15, Kino Lumière will screen a competitive documentary film, Chuck Norris vs Communism, which demonstrates the power of film to influence individual and entire society. Young Romanian director Ilinca Calugareanu will take you 30 years back in time behind the Iron Curtain in Romania when thousands of Hollywood B-films were smuggled into the country. The fearless stories of action heroes like Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone or Jean-Claude van Damme captured the children’s imagination, but it was the lavish settings and backdrops that mesmerised their parents. For the first time, people saw what had been denied to them: supermarkets stacked full of goods, the trappings of wealth, the latest fashions, fancy cars and – most of all – freedom…
A surprisingly mature feature-length directorial debut of Visar Morina and Kosovo’s official nomination for Academy Award in the category of best foreign language film, Babai deals with the topical issue of migration. It tells the story of a 10-year-old Nori and his father, Gezim, who earn a living by selling cigarettes in pre-war Kosovo of the 1990s. Gezim is an expert at escaping the past and now he wants to flee Kosovo without Nori. When they have an accident and Nori ends up in a hospital, Gezim gets his chance. When Nori is relieved, he sets out on a perilous journey and eventually finds his father in Germany to confront him with questions of why he left him behind. You can catch the film at 18.15 in Kino Mladosť.
At 20.30, you can choose one of the final two films that are on the programme of this year’s Bratislava film festival. Kino Lumière will show The Endless River by South-African director Oliver Hermanus, which revolves around the fledgling relationship between a young native woman and a French émigré who both recently suffered harsh blows of fate and now they seek solace in each other’s embrace.
At the same time, Kino Mladosť will present Sleeping with Other People, the latest film by young American playwright, screenwriter and director Leslye Headland. Her romantic yet raunchy comedy basically seeks an answer to the cardinal question: Can men and women just be friends? She does so through Jake and Lainey who lost their virginity to each other many years ago and have since become miserable failures in their respective romantic relationships. Guilty of serial infidelity, sex addiction, and self-sabotage, both of them end up at the same counselling group. Reunited, they swear to keep their relationship strictly platonic. Whether they will manage is for them to know and for you to find out.
