GRAZ SHORT FILM NIGHT 2012_short docs from Central and Eastern Europe in focus
16_00 >>> 18_00
PORTRAIT OF A WORKING MAN
alyona surzhikova_28min_ESTONIA_2010_documentary
This is a story about different people, who came to Estonia to work on the factory. Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese are working together on one Estonian Shipbuilding Factory. The work is very hard, but they are happy, that they have it.
MISS ROBINSON
alyona surzhikova_28min_ESTONIA_2009_documentary
Olga, who already for seven years has been working as a waitress in a 24-hour bar, is seeking for love that would eventually lead to marriage. The first potential husband was sentenced. She is waiting for him to return and is even ready to marry him inside the prison. As time goes by, she realizes that a marriage to a prisoner cannot be her dream. Life goes on - Olga finds new love that is also distant and ambiguous. Yearning to run from solitude and to flee from reality forces her to go to her next loved one...
MAYBE ARMENIA ONLY EXISTS IN MY IMAGINATION
karin hammer_48min_ARMENIA / AUSTRIA_2011_documentary
”In 2010 I was living in Armenia for a couple of months. I lived together with a family in a tiny appartment – 4 generations under one roof. Something very usual in Armenia. So from a very close distance I was able to watch their everyday life. I was surprised what a huge impact Armenia’s history had on everybody´s everyday life. After some time I started to film and talk to people I met and asked them about their lives, their wishes, dreams and hopes...”
18_00 >>> 20_00
SO IT GOES
zuzanna solakiewicz_12min_POLAND_2010_documentary
Remote village, twenty families, a lake, a dirt road, and destroyed buildings of an ex–State Agriculture Company. Specter of a soldier wanders near around. Other ghosts do not hesitate to reveal their presence in the neighborhood as well. The old women tell the stories about them while the youngsters still enjoy calling - up the ghosts. It is as if the senses are more opened in the emptiness of the village.
INVENTORY
pawel lozinski_9min_POLAND_2010_documentary
A short, metaphoric story, undertaking a problem of memory, identity, searching for traces of the recent past. Here, on thirty hectares in the city centre, the inventory is being made – it is to lead to reconstruction of a lost city. The camera focuses on details, showing fingers touching an obliterated inscription or a laborious process of decoding letters excavated from the ground, because each of them means something.
LITTLE BRIDE
leslaw dobrucki_15min_POLAND_2010_documentary
Our heroine stopped praying long ago. As a thirteen year-old girl she was brought from her native Turkey to Germany to marry one of her cousins. This is how her childhood ended – she became the property of a husband who tortures and degrades her. She finally decides to flee, but must continuously be in hiding. Condemned by both families, she has no chance at a normal life, neither as a wife nor a divorcee. The film is not a typical intervention reportage, but a poetic collage comprising of documentary material, family photographs and children’s drawings. This individual life story reflects the stories of many other girls and women subjected to a patriarchal law still enforced by tacit consent in the multicultural societies of Western Europe.
CHARCOAL BURNERS
piotr zlotorowicz_15min_POLAND_2010_documentary
Every summer, Marek and Janina work as charcoal burners in the Bieszczady Mountains
OH MY GOD, DEAR GOD
julia poplawska_12min_POLAND_2010_documentary
Picture of a quiet, charming and almost idyllic Polish village. The Mozejkos spend time on the porch of their wooden house, slowly conversing on what surrounds them and directly affects their lives – the weather, flowers and vegetables growing in their backyard garden. The view from the porch is their only outlook onto the world – this is where they observe the changing nature or any special events in the neighbourhood. From time to time their calm life, undisturbed by haste or worry, acquires some variety when a car or a singing group of pilgrims pass down the nearby road. This short document is a collection of static and extremely vivid takes expressing the mood of idyll, order and quiet.
THE END OF THE WORLD
mateusz skalski_9min_POLAND_2010_documentary
A story of a remote village, almost completely abandoned. All the youth have left, looking for a better life in the city. Only a few village elders have remained, and they spend their days waiting for a mobile cart to come along and sell bread and wares - their only contact with the outside world.
IN EVERY RESPECT
oliver kruger_10min_POLAND / GERMANY_2011_documentary
The red-light district in Hamburg is crowded with strange creatures. One of them we followed. She worked as a whore for 30 years. It made us think about ourselves, that hapinness and personal doom can be so close to each other.
SHANGHAI BANZAI
jurate samulionyte_25min_LITHUANIA_2010_documentary
„Every city has his own Shanghai!“ „Shanghai Banzai“– it‘s an ironic short documentary about an old and poor district nearby Vilnius city centre called Snipiskes, which is also known as Shanghai. Film exposes a paradoxical situation where countryside with its multicultural (Lithuanians, Russians, Polish, Gypsies) community exists in the very centre of Vilnius. Also film tries to find out the origin of district’s nickname Shanghai. Film portraits inhabitants of Vilnius Shanghai, who have their own rules, loves, habits and sins. Most of them live in their Past still remembering their youth. Now modern skyscrapers exchange old wooden houses and nobody knows what is waiting for “characters” of Shanghai.
20_00 >>> 22_00
ZOOM FINLAND_shorts&docs
ALONE
milla pelkonen_12min_FINLAND_2006_fiction
A one-night stand and the beginning of a new life.
LAND FOR PLAYING OUT LIFE
sanni priha_13min_FINLAND_2010_experiment
Can I reach the person whose fiction I live? Who lives in the reality I created? What do the traces of landscape speak about? As I wanted to make a film about the future, I began the expedition towards the North, my autobiographical birthplace.
STRAY SHOUT
anssi pulkkinen_13min_FINLAND_2010_experiment
“Birds can sleep while they are flying. I can’t remember the last time I was able to sleep, but I dream while awake.”
SPLITTING AT THE EDGE OF HEAVEN
elina oikari_16min_FINLAND_2009_experiment
Feelings of a generation on disorientation and their time.
GHOSTS
jan ijas_15min_FINLAND_2009_documentary
Film about building originally built as an envelope factory located 500 km down from the Arctic circle and now a centre for asylum seekers - warehouse for humans.
SAILBREAK
eeva siivonen_10min_FINLAND_2009_documentary
Moving freely in time and space, the film is a mental journey through states of mind, through rugged visions and forgotten memories.
LITTLE SNOW ANIMAL
miia tervo_20min_FINLAND_2009_documentary
It is not wrong to love – you just need to look for it in the right place.
HOW TO PICK BERRIES
elina talvensaari_20min_FINLAND_2010_documentary
Guests from far away appear at Lapland’s swamps. “How are we going to get along with these strangers when they’re taking our berries?” How to Pick Berries is a film about Finnish heart and the peculiarities of the global economy. The economy is a many-splendoured thing.
22_00 >>> 24_00
PETRZALKA IDENTITY
juraj chlpik_25min_SLOVAKIA_2010_documentary
With its 130,000 inhabitants, Petrzalka is the biggest neighborhood in Bratislava , capital of Slovakia
SISYPHUS
marek janicik_15min_SLOVAKIA_2011_documentary
Life is a big ball that we have to push up a steep hill. All it takes is a single slip to set the ball rolling back down, leaving us with no other option but to start from the bottom again... „Sisyphus“ is a portrait of a former drug addict who has moved to a little house in the country, away from civilization, and spends his time making origami in the loft. Sometimes art is the easiest way to start from scratch.
A STORY OF A DEPORTEE EXILED BY HER OWN FATHER
andrius blazevicius_14min_LITHUANIA_2011_documentary
“How can you adapt when you get 118 litas? How can you, my kiddie, adapt? You go nad must keep on searching – you go to a church, you come here… Here I’m alive. I’m 79 years old – it seems I’ve managed to adapt.”
WRITTEN IN INK
martin rath_12min_POLAND_2011_documentary
Story of a man trying to get back in touch with his sister after they haven´t been talking for 14 years. But can one change what has already been written in ink?
URBAN TUNDRA
robi uppin&maria kivirand_15min_ESTONIA_2011_documentary
“Urban Tundra” is an observing documentary about homelesness and faith. A very big snowstorm named “Monica” hits Tallinn, Estonia in December 2010 and the filmcrew visited a soupkichen dedicated to people in need. The film tries to observe the activities during Christmas holiday and document how people in need are couping with the ongoing storm.
BLACK RIDERS
victor malyshev_26min_RUSSIA_2010_documentary
Russian road documentary.
GRAZ SHORT FILM NIGHT 2012_short docs from Central and Eastern Europe in focus
