About the European Film Festival
What
European Film Festival
Who
Lesedi Oluko
When
June 22 – July 10
Where
Ster-Kinekor Cinema Nouveau in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Pretoria. eurofilmfestival.co.za
Why care
See the stories of a younger generation of European filmmakers
The fifth annual European Film Festival begins next week, and this year’s selection focuses on emerging female filmmakers’ interpretations of life on an uncertain and increasingly fractured continent. The festival is an opportunity to “promote better understanding of Europe’s diversity, and address current issues, such as migration, discrimination and terrorism, that are relevant not only in Europe but also globally”, says Dr Geraldine Reymenants, chairwoman of the EU National Institutes for Culture in South Africa.
Co-curator of the festival Lesedi Oluko, who has worked as a documentary programmer for Encounters and the Doc Leipzig festivals, relished the opportunity provided by this year’s edition, which is run by the British Council.
She describes the process of selecting films for the festival as being “like dealing with 10 different clients, so some countries will allow you to just select and for others you have to align your selection with the aims of their foreign mission in South Africa. Seventy percent of it is a conversation between the curator and the missions. With government agencies there’s always a conversation that’s a bit of back and forth and they want to know what the artistic intent is.”
In order to help meet the tight deadline for selecting the films, Oluko says, she “decided to get in a curator who I could bounce ideas off of. So I was looking for someone who knew films and had an African sensibility and understood the African market.”
Working together with her cocurator Margherita di Paola, who has worked with the Venice and LA film festivals, Oluko “decided to start watching the films first and then see if a theme emerged”.
“The only thing I wanted was new voices, so I scoured for those as much as possible — under 40 years old to kind of give a more diverse texture to what Europe looks and feels like and to match those with more prolific auteurs.”
Oluko hopes that the films she and Di Paola have selected will engage audiences in “a conversation between first-time and the more prolific filmmakers, because you have directors in their 30s and directors in their 70s all speaking about the same Europe but of course the texture looks different and I think there’s more honesty in the younger filmmakers.”
The programme includes films such as the Bafta-winning I am not a Witch by Welsh-Zambian filmmaker
Rungano Nyoni; In the Fade by Danish filmmaker Fatih Akin (winner of a Golden Globe for best foreign language film) and Mademoiselle Paradis by Austrian director Barbara Albert.
Oluko is hoping that the programme will give new perspectives on the idea of Europe that show that “life in Europe is completely uncertain without a neat beginning, middle and end to it”.
She says she believes that “a lot of European films over the last five to 10 years have suffered from telling stories about nothing with a lot of angst, but a lot of these new ‘cinematic kids’ are bold”. A selection of the films will also travel in July to the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown.
In an age when the programming of Ster-Kinekor’s Nouveau cinemas has moved away from art-house fare and challenging films from Europe and other continents towards more popular, gently entertaining films, the festival provides one of the only opportunities for lovers of cerebral cinema to get a fix of the kind of films that don’t get much of a look-in on local screens these days. LS