The most interesting films of the 18th Days of European Film

The festival will be opened in Prague´s Světozor cinema on April 14, 2011 with the comedy Three (2010) about a love triangle by renowned contemporary German film director Tom Tykwer. The film will be introduced at the festival gala opening by its main protagonists: Austrian actress Sophie Rois and German actor Devid Striesow. The Prague part of the Days of European Film will close with a preview of Czech Made Man (2011), a black comedy directed by Tomáš Řehořek with Jan Budař in the leading role, in the Lucerna cinema on April 21. The festival screening of the film will be accompanied by a delegation of the film-makers headed by director Tomáš Řehořek and actor Jan Budař.

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Out of the rich programme of this year´s festival, we would like to highlight the To the Point section which well offer the British retro comedy set in the stormy 1960s, Made in Dagenham (2011), directed by Nigel Cole, famous for his films Saving Grace and Calendar Girls. Based on real events, the director depicts a strike of women working in a factory in Dagenham who stood up for equal rights and against discrimination. With a typical British social feeling, Cole has succeeded in handling this serious topic with humour and without cheap lapses. He has thereby approached similar British comedies, such as, for instance, The Full Monty.

This year we will present a new section focused on the European Parliament´s awards, the LUX Prize, in which the awarded film When We Leave (Die Fremde, dir. by Feo Aladag, 2010) will be screened along with other nominated finalists. The winning drama, featuring a lonely fight of a young Turkish mother (Sibel Kekilli) for her young son, is an impressive view of a conflict between two cultural traditions. Out of the other films, we should name at least the Belgian Illegal (Illégal, dir. by Olivier Masset-Depasse, 2010) depicting the everyday oppressive dramas of illegal immigrant in Belgium, and the Greek comedy castigating all kinds of prejudices, Plato´s Academy (Akadimia Platonos, dir. by Filippos Tsitos, 2009). We will at the same time show the winner of last year´s LUX Prize, Welcome (dir. by Philippe Lioret, 2009), a thrilling story of an ageing swimming instructor and his disciple, refugee Bilal, who plans to swim across the Channel to England.

The National League section will again present an overview of the films that have been officially proposed as candidates for Oscar nominations by individual countries. The audience can look forward to current films from the highly acclaimed Romanian cinematography, such as Police, adjective (Politist, adjectiv, dir. by Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009), a frosty film about a conflict between an individual and the system evoking the times of the totalitarian regime with a surprisingly sharp conclusion. Another film in this section is Temptation of St. Tony (Pűha Tonu Kiusamine, dir. by Veiko Ounpuu, 2010) offering an allegoric view of the present (not only) Estonian society. It depicts a metaphoric story of a young businessman on his search for the meaning of life. This black-and-white stylised picture loaded with black humour abounds in a similarly cunning and absurd poetics like in the films by Pavel Juráček, a legend of the Czech New Film Wave of the 1960s.

The programme will again include The Best Of section of the most interesting works from national cinematographies. The audience can see, for example, the sophisticated Slovenian thriller Personal Baggage (Osebna prtljaga, dir. By Janez Lapajne, 2009) about a complicated love triangle, a seductive femme fatale and one unfortunate coincidence, as well as The Tree (L´arbre, dir. by Julie Bertucelli, 2010), a French magical mesmeric film with popular actress and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg in the leading role. The Spanish film Woman without Piano (La mujer sin piano, dir. By Javier Rebollo, 2009) for a change features Jan Budař in an atypical role of a Polish repairman.

A new part of the this year´s programme is the Film&Music section presenting several selected European films elaborating music as their main theme, such as the documentary about the Viennese electronic and experimental scene VINYL (dir. by Andrew Standen-Raz, 2010), and the Polish retro comedy about a punk band under the previous regime, All that I Love (Wszystko co kocham, dir. by Jacek Borcuch, 2009). It is freely connected with the Polish documentary Beats of Freedom (Zew volnosci, dir. by Leszek Gnoinski, Wojciech Slota) mapping the unofficial music scene in the communist Poland. Out of the other music films, we would like to mention the Hungarian retro musical Made in Hungaria (dir. by Gergely Fonyó, 2009) about the first impulses of rock and roll in Hungary, which markedly reminds of the successful musical comedy Big Beat (Šakalí léta) by Jan Hřebejk.