goEast - Festival of Central and Eastern European Film runs in Wiesbaden from 9 to 15 April 2008 / A symposium on documentary film from former Yugoslavia reflects the ongoing quest for specific national identities / Homage to Sergei Paradzhanov, the "magician with three motherlands" / Portrait section dedicated to Benedek Fliegauf / New documentary film award from Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future"
The goEast festival is growing in pace with the dynamic development of filmmaking in Eastern Europe: With their directors and producers in attendance, over 150 fiction and documentary films from as many as 20 different countries will screen during the 7 days of the festival, and so offer considerable insight into the vigorous filmmaking scene in Central and Eastern Europe. Further opportunities to learn more about the region are offered by discussion forums and a comprehensive sidebar programme. New in 2008: The in-house cinema of the German Film Museum in Frankfurt is screening films from the goEast programme simultaneously with the Festival.
10 feature films and 6 documentaries have been selected for the goEast Competition for various prizes worth € 29,500 in total. An outstanding addition to the festival honours in 2008 is the "Remembrance and Future" documentary award sponsored by the Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" and endowed with prize money of € 10,000. The annual prize will go to directors either from a formerly communist country of Eastern Europe, or (representing new geographical territory for goEast) from Israel or Germany, who critically and constructively analyze social developments in their countries of origin, and thereby point out future-oriented perspectives.
The Škoda-prize, the "Golden Lily" (€ 10,000) for Best Film, is donated by Škoda Auto Deutschland. The City of Wiesbaden awards the Prize for Best director (€ 7,500), and the Federal Foreign Office awards a Prize for Cultural Diversity (€ 2,000). The main sponsors of the Festival, which is staged by the German Film Institute - DIF, are the Hessian Ministry of Science and Art and the City of Wiesbaden.
Important goals of goEast are to promote up-and-coming filmmakers and enhance their networking. For the second time, the Robert Bosch Stiftung has chosen goEast as the platform for the awarding of that foundation's Promotional Prize for coproductions by young filmmakers from German and the countries of Eastern and Southeast Europe. Worth up to € 210,000 in total, the Promotional Prize supports the realization of film projects in the categories Short Film, Documentary, and Animated Film. In 2008, the Robert Bosch Stiftung has intensified its cooperation with goEast: In addition to funding the "goEast Young Professionals" workshop, the foundation has enabled the launch of a Project Market for Young Filmmakers from East and West.
Film students from Prague, Warsaw, Potsdam, the Rhine-Main region and Kassel are participating in the 2008 goEast Film School Competition for the prizes the BHF-BANK-Foundation annually bestows in the categories Animated/Experimental Film, Short Film, Documentary Film (respectively € 1,000). The foundation awards an additional promotional prize worth € 1,500 to the best short from a non-German film school showing at goEast.
Sergei Paradzhanov, a "magician with three motherlands", is the subject of a goEast Homage in 2008. Born in Georgia to Armenian parents, Paradzhanov received his artistic inspiration in the Ukraine and went on to become one of the most important filmmakers to emerge from the Soviet Union - and at the same time the prisoner of a dictatorial system. goEast presents the unique talent of this artist-director, who died in 1990, in screenings of THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES (USSR, 1969), an art film of overwhelming beauty and compelling surrealism, SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS (USSR 1964), LEGEND OF SURAM FORTRESS (USSR, 1985), and Ashik Kerib (USSR, 1988).
In 2008, the Portrait section devoted to the generation of directors who directly experienced the period of political and social transformation in Central and Eastern Europe surveys the work of young Hungarian filmmaker Benedek Fliegauf. His feature debut RengeteG / FOREST gained him the Wolfgang-Staudte-Preis at the 2003 Berlin International Film Festival and the follow-on film DEALER won the award for Best Director at goEast in 2004.
The ex-Yugoslav republics, in search of specific identities and still scarred by the trauma of war, are caught up in a process of "nation (re-)building". The goEast Symposium running from 10 to 12 April 2008 explores the way these developments have been documented on film since the 1990s. Lectures and discussions with guests from Southeast Europe and Germany will be accompanied by an extensive series of films little known in Germany.
Despite increasing success on the international circuit, Eastern European films continue to suffer from lacking distribution to a wider audience. To coincide with the opening of the 2008 Festival, goEast has cooperated with the publishing house absolut MEDIEN and, as media partner, the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper to launch the first goEast Edition with contemporary and classic works of Eastern European cinema. The first DVD includes the goEast prizewinners DEALER (Hungary, 2004, dir: Benedek Fliegauf) and Klopka (Serbia/Germany/Hungary, 2007, dir: Srdan Golubović).
Press contact: Organizer:
Natalie Kronast Deutsches Filminstitut - DIF
Phone: +49 (0)69 / 961 220 655 Schaumainkai 41
e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 60596 Frankfurt am Main
Julia Hoscislawski (assistant)
Phone: +49 (0)69 / 961 220 656 E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Internet: www.filmfestival-goEast.de
