Nik Xhelilaj in Artan Minarolli's Alive!
The 2010 edition of Los Angeles' South-East European Film Festival kicks off this evening with a screening of Arnold Schwartzman's one-minute "photo-documentary" The Wall, about the bit-by-bit destruction of the Berlin Wall, at 7 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut in the Mid-Wilshire Area.
Schwartzman, the Oscar-winning director of the documentary feature Genocide (1982), will be present to introduce his film.
The Wall will be immediately followed by an intriguing double-bill: the US premiere of Boris Mitic's Serbian documentary Goodbye, How Are You?, and the Los Angeles premiere of Artan Minarolli's Albanian social-drama-cum-thriller Alive!. Minarolli will be present for a q&a after the screening.
Mitic's Goodbye, How Are You? is described as a quirky look back at the last 40 years of Serbian history. And that's one place in the world where history has been moving in all sorts of directions at lightning speed.
According to the festival's website, Mitic's film features "a nation’s oral tradition of sardonic response to conflict and corruption. The beautifully selected and wittily juxtaposed images, meanwhile, form an insightful, compelling portrait of daily existence in all its banalities, extremes and ironies. With shades of Patrick Keiller and Chris Marker, this collage of ideas is both thought-provoking and darkly comic."
Minarolli's drama Alive! is a critique of that country's "traditional family value" of blood feuds. In the film, a young student returns to his rural village in the Albanian mountains to attend his father’s funeral. Once there, he discovers that he has unwittingly placed himself smack in the midst of a generations-old war between rival clans. Now, the student must find a way out of that "family tradition" quagmire in order to remain alive.
Alive! plays at 8 p.m. tonight.
The Goethe-Institut is located at 5750 Wilshire Blvd., Ste 100.