Eastern Promises

The sixth edition of Eastern Promises is going to be ground-breaking and very turbulent. The major part of this year’s selection centres around moments of fighting for freedom, victory or truth. We are going to remember Romania’s hard times of breaking free from the clutches of the Soviet Union. Films Kalev and January look back at the events of 1991, while the poetic documentary Between Revolutions offers a different perspective on national emancipation outlining the parallels between Romanian and Iranian revolutions.
The Chechen directorial debut The Cage Is Looking for a Bird talks about fighting for personal freedom within a traditional patriarchal system. In The Silent Twins, two sisters are fighting for freedom from their colourful fantasies. The topic of freedom is present in all fifteen films of the Eastern Promises section. And it is not only the freedom of humans. For example, in EO, it is a donkey that mirrors the sins, passions and troubles of its short-time owners.

Eastern Promises is an all-year-round section that, besides the SFS, also takes place in our partner cinema Edison Filmhub.

Programmers:

Kamila Dolotina is a programmer and a passionate lover of Eastern European cinema. She is a big fan of good films (and wines) and a sworn enemy of the bad ones.

Petr Vlček is a film historian and a director of Warsaw’s Czech Centre. His main area of expertise is Polish cinema. He’s been collaborating with the Summer Film School since 2007. In 2011, he became one of our programmers.