The EC delegation puts together this ten-film repertoire of varied European films at Kyiv cinema starting Sept. 17.
frost on the pumpkins, etc. – you get a slightly (if only slightly) better crop of movies in the theaters. It has to do on some level with the greater moral seriousness of the fall, and the way in which the experience of returning to school is seared into our race memory: One tends to feel somewhat smarter as the leaves turn, and life seems slightly more important.
Kyiv, unfortunately, has tended to remain outside of this fine filmic dynamic. Film-wise, Kyiv takes what it can get in autumn, just as it does throughout the rest of the year. That generally means the lowest filth that Hollywood has to offer: movies, by and large, that are stupid enough to survive the process of cultural dislocation, not to mention those crude voiceover jobs courtesy of the men and women up at Mosfilm. Kyiv is not a cinephile’s paradise; it’s occurred to me at times here that there must exist, somewhere in the corpus of national law, a shadow clause stipulating that a significant given percentage of imported movies have to feature Freddie Prinze, Jr.
That’s why it’s nice to hear about the European Union Film Festival, which will play in the Kyiv cinema (19 Chervonoarmiyska, Lva Tolstoho metro, 201-0101) from Sept. 17 until Sept. 24. Then the festival will move for other Ukrainians to enjoy: first to Odessa, then to Lviv and finally to Kharkiv, where the festival winds up on Oct. 5.
Watch for These
What the festival means is that for those several weeks, Ukrainian movie theaters will play a bunch of recent movies from EU countries, including some of the new EU member-states close to Ukraine.
From Estonia, for example, comes the acclaimed “The Heart of the Bear,” by Arvo Iho, about a young man who bails out of civilization and makes his way to northern Siberia, where he presumes to live as a hunter – before he starts being pursued himself by a pretty teacher from a local town. “Rain Falls on Our Souls,” meanwhile, is a good Slovakian drama about an escaped criminal who steals a car in which a little girl is hiding, setting off an appealing flight/buddy story. The Swedish “In Bed with Santa” is an acclaimed sex comedy about a shrink who’s as bad at taking care of his own emotional business as he’s good at helping other people with their own.
European Union Film Festival (all films at Kyiv cinema):
Sept. 17: Young Kees (the Netherlands), 7 p.m.
Sept. 18: One of Those Days (France), 7 p.m.
The Heart of the Bear (Estonia), 9 p.m.
Sept. 19: My Heart is Not With You (Italy), 7 p.m.
Elza and Gili (Lithuania), 9 p.m.
Sept. 20: Rain Falls on Our Souls (Slovakia), 7 p.m.
Anansi – A Dream of Europe (Germany), 9 p.m.
Sept. 21: In Bed with Santa (Sweden), 7 p.m.
Beshketniki (Czech Republic), 9 p.m.
Sept. 22: Straz (Belgium), 7 p.m.
Eila (Finland), 9 p.m.
Sept. 23: Eyes of Primrose (Poland), 7 p.m.
The Other Side of the Bed (Spain), 9 p.m.
Sept. 24: Hell (Portugal), 9 p.m.
