15. May 2012

FILM SYMPOSIUM „I SEE YOU. DO YOU SEE ME?“

The first LET’S CEE film symposium is scheduled for the second day of the festival, the 29th of May, 2012, and takes place at Vienna’s Apollo Cinema.

This year’s symposium I SEE YOU.DO YOU SEE ME? Identities on the Move. Continuities and Fractures focuses on film works confronting the issues of migration and identity while raising the following main questions: To what extent are biography and migration interrelated? To what extent do they determine each other? How can the individual history and experience of migration be translated onto the screen? What is the contextual conclusion?

The films chosen for the symposium are the two documentaries, Siberian Lesson by the Polish director Wojciech Staroń from 1998 and Patria Mia, Nomad Direction (2008) by the Bosnian director Duška Zagorac as well as the feature film Look, Stranger (2010) by the New York-born Arielle Javitsch. In a powerful, sensitive and even disturbing way, the films depict their protagonists on their different migration journeys, in exile or on their way back to their ‘home country’ and show how their journey inevitably becomes a search for identity, since all characters have to redefine or even re-invent their own identity/-ies in that process.

The film screenings will be followed by a high-quality panel discussion, which is organized by the LET’S CEE Film Festival and the Institute for the Danube Region and Central Europe (IDM). The event’s main supporter is the Austrian Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI).

PROGRAMME OF THE FILM SYMPOSIUM

13:00 Syberyjska lekcja (Siberian Lesson)
Documentary, Poland 1998, 57 min.
director and camera: Wojciech Staroń

16:00 Look, Stranger
Feature film, Serbia/Slovenia 2010, 86 min.
director and screenplay: Arielle Javitch
Actors: Anamaria Marinca, Tom Burke, Valentina Berisa

14:30 Patria Mia, Nomad Direction
Documentary, UK/Bosnia and Herzegovina 2008, 52 min.
director: Duška Zagorac

18:00 Panel discussion

with Anamaria Marinca, main actress in Look, Stranger, Dr. Tina Olteanu, FernUni Hagen, Faculty of culture and social sciences, Wojciech Staroń, director of Syberyjska lekcja, Duška Zagorac, director of Patria Mia, Nomad Direction.Moderation: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Müller-Funk, Department of European and Comparative Literature and Language Studies of the University of Vienna.