NEWS: East End Film Festival

One of London’s biggest film festivals (drawing 30,000 attendees last year), the East End Film Festival will take place between Thursday, 22nd April and Friday, 30th April 2010.

The nine-day event will include features, documentaries and shorts, plus film-focused discussions and live music and arts events spread across thirty East End venues. This year the festival will screen over 200 films, and amongst those will be foreign-language titles such as Presumed Guilty, Lonely Pack, The Border, I Am (Ya), Cargo 200 (Gruz 200), Morphia, Crush, Russia 88, Buben Baraban and Julia…

Presumed Guilty
Introduced by Kate Allen, Director of Amnesty International UK, Presumed Guilty is a documentary that attempts to exonerate a wrongly convicted man: a young breakdancer and rapper, sentenced to twenty years in prison for a murder he clearly could not have committed. Shot with a handheld camera by American-based attorneys Roberto Hernandez and Geoffrey Smith, and accompanied by raw hip-hop beats, the film exposes Mexico’s unsound legal system.

 

Lonely Pack
The everyday life of a street child in Nepal is portrayed in Lonely Pack. This impressive first feature documentary is simply told: no narrator, music, or staging – just the poignant stories of the kids themselves. Showing the absurdity of how some political decisions on paper can have disastrous effects on the ground.

The Border
Jaroslav Vojtek’s The Border documents how a village was divided between the Ukraine and Czechoslovakia when borders were randomly drawn in 1946 – as a result, whole families were literally split apart.

I Am (Ya)
Russia’s famous young actress, Oksana Akinshina comes to East London to present her gritty new film I Am (Ya). Described as a ‘psychedelic drama’, it’s the story of post-Gladnost Russia, and how the youth tried to find themselves following the collapse of Communism. Director Igor Voloshin will join the Q&A afterwards.

Russian director Aleksey Balabanov will present his two most recent films:
Cargo 200
Using the code-word for the boxes which bring dead soldiers back from Afghanistan, Cargo 200 (Gruz 200) is a dark comedy that follows a corrupt police chief in rural Soviet Russia in 1984.

Morphia
Based on the book by Mikhail Bulgakov, Morphia takes us back to 19th century Siberia, where a young doctor descends into drug addiction.
both screenings will be followed by a director Q&A).

Crush
Crush is a unique collaboration of five innovative ‘New Wave’ Russian directors (Petr Buslov, Ivan Vyrypayev, Alexei German Jr., Kirill Serebrennikov, and Boris Khlebnikov), who each present a cinematic statement on what love is in contemporary Russia.

Russia 88
The festivals exploration of new Russian cinema continues with Russia 88, Pavel Bardin’s highly polemic mocumentary about Moscow’s neo-Nazis.

Buben Baraban
Alexei Mizgirey’s intense, Locarno Silver Leopard-winning drama.

Julia
A late night screening of Alexander Strizhenov’s school horror.


For more information on the event, visit the festival’s official website here.