1) The focus of the festival is on Central and Eastern European cinema.
Why might that be the case? How does Trieste fit within these regions?
The Trieste Film Festival is the leading Italian festival focusing exclusively on Central and Eastern European cinema, a vast geographical area which today consists of more than 30 countries (even if not all of them belong to the European Union yet), from the Baltic sea to the former Soviet republics, down to Central European countries, the Balkan macro-region until Greece and the Mediterranean sea. We have been following these countries with constant and scrupulous attention, and through their film productions we have brought stories on the ‘New Europe’ and its history before and after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Central and Eastern Europe is a huge area of gigantic proportions and very different cultural and linguistic differences, and cinema is the only contemporary art embracing all these diversities and at the same time going beyond their frontiers, using the common language of cinema.
Currently, the festival offers a broad and diverse programme, consisting of an average of a hundred titles from CEE countries, aiding the rapid growth of national and international premieres of feature films, short films and documentaries, all in the original versions, subtitled in English and Italian. In addition to the presentation of the best films made during the year in Central and Eastern Europe and its surroundings, each year there is a retrospective that pays homage to a director of particular importance; a monograph on a cinematic movement, a geographical area or a particular historical period; special events, celebrations and tributes to directors and film schools that have distinguished themselves in the production and / or distribution of film; a section (Art & Sound) dedicated to art and music; and events of various kinds (exhibitions, concerts, book presentations, meetings with festival guests, masterclasses and performances).
Trieste is a natural bridge between East and West, a privileged observation post onto the New Europe; multicultural crossroads; a seaport; a frontier city of comings and goings, and several contradictions. A small Vienna on the sea; a former maritime capital of the Habsburg Empire; a former outpost through which the capitalist West looked out onto the Communist Eastern block, at once uniting and dividing Europe. A world characterised by being ‘ex’, where a past full of promise has been replaced by disappointment and the collapse of big hopes for the development of the city’s port.
Here the sea divides and unites, enlarging the borders, and at the same time blurring them, in as much as people from different countries have mixed up: Serbs, Greeks, Slovenians, Jewish, Germans, Austrians, Americans…
INTERVISTA: Nicoletta Romeo
del Trieste Film Festival