Tag: 2017

While the title of our next film focuses on child, the character at the centre of the film is very much the mother. And a mother’s love even more so, a love taken to extremes, larger than life.

Director Calin Peter Netzer’s own mother served as inspiration for his domineering character Cornelia, a mother who will stop at nothing to deepen her intimacy with her son and to protect him from harm.

Awarded the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Child’ Pose is a drama that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Perfectly calibrated, it is lead by the feisty Cornelia, a successful architect used to making ruling decisions not only in her work, but in her life and that of her son too.

We meet her first as she is expressing her discontent at a man who doesn’t reward her with the attention and gratitude she expects. You could mistakenly think it’s a lover she’s talking about, but it is her son Barbu she is referring to, now a 30-year old who wants to live his life outside the influence of his mother.

But a tragic event brings them in interpendence again. Barbu is involved in an accident which leaves him vulnerable to his mother’s desire to control the situation. He runs over and kills a boy from a modest family. Despite all the evidence incriminating him, his mother is still convinced of his innocence and present him as an exemplary son to the bereft family, a powerful and meaningful scene.

What is certain is you will leave the film with a lot of questions about what a mother’s love means, when it is too much, when it crosses invisible limits.

Buy your pass now and join us for the screening on Sunday 9 April.

 

This coming Sunday is going to be a treat: we don’t just have a fantastic film and an interview with its director, but also a very special guest: Geelong-based artist Mirjana Margetic.  Mirjana migrated to Australia from Serbia in the early 90s and since then she has made a name for herself as an artist, daringly exploring questions of identity and connection between nature and the feminine.

On Sunday she will talk to us about What shapes my identity today: the history of Serbian migration in Victoria, the book that she  edited, bringing together stories of migration from Serbia to Australia. She will share some of those stories during her talk, exploring the painstaking journey of starting out again on the other side of the world.

Her latest exhibition, ‘Female Ancestry — A life of the cloth, capture and recover’, is a reflection on women’s identity through a variety of media, including recycled fabrics and needlework. You’ll get to see some of her exquisite artwork on the screen on Sunday.

So book your pass if you haven’t yet, for a real feast of a Sunday afternoon, celebrating our rich multicultural identity.

The event will start at 2.30pm, with Mirjana Margetic’s talk, followed by the Open cage screening, and a brief q&a with Sinisa Galic, the film director.

 

This is the message that director Sinisa Galic wants to send with his film Open cage, our screening choice for diversity month. This Sunday we invite you to find out if he succeeds.

The film mixes characters and perspectives from the East and the West: a young photojournalist from Berlin meets a young woman from Belgrade, who dreams of a better life abroad. Beyond their apparent differences, the two young women also have things in common, and the film strives to illustrate this shared humanity. They are both searching for something, a search that their background and history dictates.

‘We are all kind of connected, even if we think we are opposing. We have to be conscious of the similarities between us,’ says Sinisa Galic in an interview with Sabisa Paisa last week.

The connectedness we see on screen was mirrored in the film crew on set, with a team of over 40 people from different countries: Germany, Serbia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Turkey and USA working on it.

Book you pass now and join us to celebrate Harmony Week with a film.

 

This March we are partnering with the Victorian Multicultural Commission to celebrate Cultural Diversity Week.  Every March Victorians celebrate living in the most multicultural state in Australia and this year we’re on board with the proceedings.

Euraw Stories is all about fostering the cultural richness that comes with diversity and we jumped at the chance to celebrate it with everyone else.  For the occasion we are screening Open Cage, the story of a German photojournalist who travels to Serbia, where she connects with a refugee, Maja.

Book your tickets now. Don’t forget that if you buy a yearly pass, you can bring a friend to the screening for free.

 

A simple Google search reveals a daring director who has had a good share of industry awards and critics’ attention. But that’s not the whole story about Gyula Nemes.

A few films into his career, and Nemes is positioning himself as a rebel child of Hungarian cinema. In terms of his films, but also in terms of his views and statements.

He is no stranger to choosing hot issues to focus on. His short film The Lost World (was awarded at Karlovy Vart, Hamburg and Navarra) is a documentary about people living in houseboats and wooden houses, in danger of being evicted by investors. Nemes shot the 20 minutes doco over 10 years.

His latest film, Zero, released in 2015, imagines a near future where the imminent extinction of bees brings havoc among humans. It is an explosive experimental film, with a clear political agenda. As such, some scenes offended one of the funding bodies, the Hungarian Film Fund. Nemes had to concede to deleting them, but not without making it all public.

The incident, he confessed in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, paired with recent political developments, are making him reconsider his future as a filmmaker in Hungary.

‘I don’t want to live in a country where there is an Iron Curtain. I want to live in a free country,’ said Nemes to the Hollywood Reporter interviewer.

But you can hear straight from the horse’s mouth this Sunday when we’re screening his latest film Zero.  As the time different didn’t allow for a live interview, Sabi Paisa is preparing a Skype interview with Gyula Nemes which we will play for you.

So book your tickets for Zero through Sustainable Living Festival now, or buy a EuRaw Stories pass.

“Where there are no bees on the Earth, the humanity has a mere four years left to live’, said Albert Einstein. Einstein’s quote inspired director Gyula Nemes to explore this possibility.

Zero, his second fiction feature, starts from this premise and explores the interdependency between bees and humanity using a variety of cinematic genres: melodrama, burlesque, comedy. The story is accompanied by the buzzing of bees and the sound of TV commentaries, and there is no filmed dialogue.

But the lack of dialogue is compensated with a rich plot. The story revolves around the manager of an artificial honey factory who gets to taste real honey, and as a result decides to quit his job, move to the forest and become a beekeeper. But his bees start dying radiated by a nearby mobile phone mast. Together with his lover he launches an attack on everything that kills the bees: GM farming, factories, motorways. They become notorious celebrities and their fight triggers a revolution.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you would have heard about the collapse of bees colonies worldwide. Zero takes Einstein’s foresight and the current bees situation and runs with them in a playful daring cinematic display. So book your tickets through Sustainable Living Festival now, or buy a EuRaw Stories pass.

The environmental message in Zero, Gyula Nemes’ second feature film, is very strong. But this is where similarities with other films in the genre end. You wouldn’t be wrong to depict Zero as a playground for Nemes’ whimsy.

In only 83 minutes, the film explores several genres, from comedy, environmental parody, melodrama, road movie, and even burlesque. You can see how it might be a bit difficult to categorise it.

Beyond genre experimentation, Nemes pushes the boundaries with his political commentary. Zero risked being banned in Hungary and losing funding from the Hungarian National Film Fund unless a controversial scene was removed. Which Nemes did, but also told his audiences all about it. The offending scene featured a character firing a shot at portraits of leading politicians painted on watermelons, one of them particularly in disagreement with the fund. And the show goes on…

“This is a very subversive film about globalization, capitalism, political dictatorship and pollution,” a jesting Nemes told Hollywood Reporter. “We had very long discussions with the film fund about which fruit we can [use]…watermelons, apples…and which politicians we can shoot into the face and which not.”

If this sparked your interest a little bit, book your tickets for Zero through Sustainable Living Festival now, or buy a EuRaw Stories pass and you’re in.

 

In February Melbourne will be buzzing with environmentally-themed events, the Sustainable Living Festival and Transitions Film Festival among those. If you want to be in the know, but not sure where to start, we have something to ease you into the scene.

The first of our exciting collaborations for the year is with the Sustainable Living Festival (SLF).  As part of the festival, we will be screening a sustainability-themed film from Eastern Europe.

If you’re already a regular at sustainable events, next month you can get your share of sustainable thinking at EuRaw Stories.

Stay tuned as we announce the film later this week. For now, we can let you in on some of the themes it deals with : bees, sex and consumerism. Did we get you interested?