The 14th Festival of Central and Eastern European Film goEast is on! From Wednesday, April 9th to Tuesday, April 15th, the city of Wiesbaden in Germany will host a total of 140 films from 22 countries.

The 10 feature films and six documentaries presented at the Official Competition are competiting for four prizes awarded by an international jury. Among them we meet the Slovenian Seduce me by Marko Santic, the Romanian documentary Valley of Sighs by Mihai Andrei Leaha, Andrei Crisan and Iulia Elena Hossu, the Romanian-French co-production When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism by Corneliu Porumboiu and the Romanian Quod Erat Demonstrandum by Andrei Gruzsniczki. 

These Balkan films are nominated for the Skoda Film Award, the Award of the City Wiesbaden for Best Director, the Award of the Federal Foreigh Office for “artistic originality which creates cultural diversity” and the “Remembrance and Future” Documentary Award of the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future”. Furthermore, a jury dispatched by FIPRESCI will hand to a film the International Critics΄ Award.

Running under the title “Socialism – Utopia Revisited”, this year’s Beyond Belonging section looks at post-communist blueprints for identity, at the dark side of neo-liberal social orders, and the impoverishment of large sectors of the population. In this section will screen four Balkan documentaries. The Bulgarian The Last Black Sea Pirates by Svetoslav Stoyanov, the Serbian Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved our Collective Body by Marta Popivoda, the Croatian Married to The Swiss Franc by Arsen Oremovic and the multi-awarded Slovak Republic, Czech Republic and Croatian co-production Velvet Terrorists by Pavol Pekarcik, Ivan Ostrochovsky and Peter Kerekes. 

The same section also runs a short film programme called “(Post) Socialism Revisited”. This programme surveys film and video work of the past five years of Alternative Film/Video Belgrade, dealing with the (post-)socialist space and living conditions. The compilation was curated by Greg de Cuir, selector and programmer for Alternative Film/Video Belgrade, Europe΄s oldest festival of avant-garde film and video art. Out of the eight films in total, six come from the Balkan Region.

Finally the Romanian documentary The Curse of the Hedgehog by Dumitru Burdala (2005, 93min) will screen in the Specials section, while the same category will present a selection of eight short films from The National Film Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

For more information about the festival΄s programme and parallel events please visit goEast official website.