The eighth edition of Panorama Europe returns to the Museum of the Moving Image and the Bohemian National Hall from May 6-22. In 2016 the festival will present 19 films from countries ranging from Greece to Lithuania, and genres that go from coming of age stories, to vampire musicals. The festival will feature in-person appearances by Valeria Golino (who stars in opening night film Anna) and free screenings of The Maias: Scenes from Romantic Life (Os Maias - Cenas da Vida Romântica) from Portugal. It is sure to be another memorable year for Panorama Europe, so here are five titles that we found essential:
Anna
Giuseppe Gaudino’s hallucinatory film, Anna, is framed around a gaudy ballad telling the tale of our heroine. Anna (Valeria Golino) is a loving mother whose family and neighborhood seethes with the everyday and the chthonic violence of Naples, a theme recently repopularized by Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan novels. To try to describe the tenor, style, and visuals would lead to an unwieldy grab bag of references: Fellini, Terry Gilliam, the cover designers of pulp-romance. Somehow the result is fascinating, if not immediately comprehensible. Golino makes no false strides as she portrays a sweet but desperate wife to a thug, and her gradual seduction by a TV actor is somehow believable and not infuriatingly irresponsible. The plot congeals gradually and then suddenly, but this is appropriate given that it is a film that deals with denial and self-delusion. It is a state of mind characteristic of such feverish confusion before finally dissolving into clarity. - Athena Bryan
The Cleaner
A quiet yet bristling time-bomb in the making, Tomáš has an enviable job of cleaning up after dead bodies. He’s extremely good at it, having had early childhood training. As he gets closer to the object of his affection, a girl named Kristina, much more gets unlocked than his own psychological breakthrough, though his therapist seems to think otherwise. Rifting hard between tenderness and brutality, this is “The Drop” with longer, darker thorns puncturing deep into the belly. “Cistic” is a compelling portrait cleverly framed through the POV of a fiercely burning, wounded young man who loves as much as he restrains, making the brief, benign scenes where he floats an inflated shark out the window or reads ever-so-quietly under a bed, all the more hilarious and heart-breaking, simultaneously. Underneath that, an uncertainty and longing continues for us, as the film ends leaving an evocative scent of mystery behind. This is one to watch again and again for just its edgy poetry. - Cece Lee
Lampedusa in Winter
Jakob Brossman’s riveting documentary focuses on the inhabitants of the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa. A tiny piece of land inhabited by a little over six thousand people that we wouldn’t hear much of, if it wasn’t because it’s often one of the stops at the center of the terrifying journey embarked by thousands of refugees who leave their home countries behind in search of a better life in Europe. The film presents a moral challenge because audience members will inevitably want to impose subjective weights on the two populations at the center; how are the problems of Lampedusa's inhabitants more important, or even worthy of being mentioned, along with the tragedy of refugees? Brossman doesn’t have specific answers, but what he’s done in the film is show what happens when the world pretty much forgets about your existence. - Jose Solis
Silent
In Yorgos Gkikapeppas’ Silent, a soprano named Dido suddenly loses her voice — singing and otherwise — and leaves her studies for her native Greece. In an abandoned family home, visitors come to her in a controlled, sequential structure that is further punctuated by explicit title cards for each part. Emotive and vertiginous, this film examines voice and the lack thereof on several levels: artistic voice, political voice, the ability to be heard within a family, and, on its most esoteric and Freudian level, the “traumatic dimension of the voice” (to steal a phrase from Zizek) where the voice is an external object, alien to the constitutive elements of the body. Dido’s ailments are an impenetrable tangle of family dysfunction, the shadow of ’68, foiled artistic ambition, and the adolescent hysteria delimiting and comprehending the self. Greece continues to impress with ambitious, new directors. - Athena Bryan
Spartacus & Cassandra
Director Ioannis Nuguet’s documentary about two Romani children living in France presents yet another impossible conundrum to solve. The children in question are forced to choose between living in poverty and homelessness with their biological parents, or living with a foster family where they would have a more stable life and a secure future. Because the children are in their pre-adolescence they have to cope with making decisions that toddlers would take more lightly. One of the most heartbreaking moments in the film is in fact when Spartacus, the eldest, wonders if he deserves to be happy knowing that his parents are still living in the streets. The film showcases a system that is damaged to the core, but it also illuminates the children’s plea with moments of hope. - Jose Solis
For tickets and more information about Panorama Europe 2016 click here.
