South East European Film Festival Los Angeles
Deadline for submissions and call for volunteers!
Content
1 - Deadline and call for volunteers
2 – Scholars take notice of our ’06 hit “Whose is this song?”
3 - “4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days” makes a splash at the box office
4 – Radu Jude gets Sundance funding
5 – Eastern European showcase at the University of Southern California
Deadline for submissions for this year’s festival is March 15
Dear interested filmmakers……the submission deadline is fast approaching. Send us your DVD ’s, submit your films, and let us know is you’d like to offer a sneak preview of your work in progress.
Film students, international students, and everyone else: send us your resumes if you are interested in internships, volunteering, getting class credit, or simply being part of the festival and seeing tons of interesting movies.
Email us at volunteers (at) seefilmla (dot) org.
Scholars take notice of our ’06 hit “Whose is this song?
Our wildly successful ‘06 festival entry WHOSE IS THIS SONG? Whose is this Song? finds its place in a great new book
SEE Film LA festival-veteran “Whose is This Song?” finds its way into Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene, a new book edited by Donna A Buchanan highlighting political issues surrounding South East European identity through music. Donna wrote two chapters, including: ·"Oh, Those Turks!” Music, Politics, and Interculturality in the Balkans and Beyond
·Bulgarian Ethnopop along the Old Via Militaris: Ottomanism, Orientalism, or Balkan Cosmopolitanism?.
The book explores the Balkan region’s cultural similarities through music, while contrasting the fracturing of territories into ‘unique’ and supposedly isolated cultures. Using examples of local music in the region, as in Whose is This Song?, we learn that once again, we are not so different from our neighbors after all.
Donna A. Buchanan is associate professor of music at the University of Illinois , Urbana-Champaign, where she is also the Director of the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center . She is the author of Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition (2006).
“4 months…” strong showing at the box office
The most talked about foreign film of the year, Romania ’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days by director Christian Mungiu has grossed $680, 220 in US box office receipts as of February 24th. Despite the film being snubbed by Academy for this one of this year’s foreign film nods, this drama focusing on the struggle of a young Romanian woman seeking an underground abortion in 1987 is still going quite strong, already beating out US box-office earnings from two other recent notable Romanian films, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 12:08 East of Bucharest.
Radu Jude gets Sundance funding
New Romanian project wins funding support at Sundance The Happiest Girl in the World, a film by Radu Jude, is one of four winners of the 2008 Sundance Institute and NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) International Filmmakers Awards.
These annual awards were created in 1996 to honor and support visionary film directors from four global regions ( Europe , Latin America , the United States , and Japan ) in realizing their next projects. The winning director from each region will receive a $10,000 award and a guarantee from NHK to purchase the Japanese television broadcast rights upon completion of their project. Jude promises to be yet another great filmmaker coming from Romania and will undoubtedly play a part in the national cinema in the near future.
Eastern European showcase at USC
On Friday, February 29 and Saturday, March 1st, USC will be holding a showcase of some of the best films from “Eastern and Southern Europe that directly engage with post-Cold War transformations and the rethinking of what European identity and European cinema mean.”
Among the screenings will be two notable films: Tirana Year Zero by Fatmir Koci and 12:08 East of Bucharest by Corneliu Porumboiu.
All screenings will be free and open to the general public, but individual reservations for each screening will be required. The program is being held in the Norris Cinema Theatre/Frank Sinatra Hall. For more info, please visit the USC events website at:
http://cinema.usc.edu/about/events/
(Films from the New Europe )
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