A film with Penélope Cruz will open the Days of European Film – News

Among other things, the festival will present a section dedicated to the German director Fatih Akin, who won awards from the Berlinale and Cannes festivals, and will focus on the increasingly successful cinematography of the Benelux countries.

The premiere of the Italian-French film will open the show Immensity starring Penélope Cruz. Director Emanuel Criales’ film about the complexities of growing up takes place in Rome in the 1970s, and Cruz plays a woman whose marriage is falling apart, but the couple don’t want to separate: they have to hold on for the sake of the children.

The oldest Adriana is just twelve years old and is an attentive witness of the growing tension between her parents and her mother’s moods. She herself feels like a boy and tries to convince everyone else of it. Her stubbornness brings the already fragile family balance to the breaking point.

“Contemporary European filmmakers have their sights set on topics such as coming of age, disinformation, changes in society, events at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, ecology and sustainability. We thus bring unique testimony from various parts of Europe about the present and the recent past,” says festival dramaturg Šimon Šafránek.

In the main competition, focused on debuts, several films will compete in which unseen child or young actors excel, whether it is a Portuguese film Living Soula Latvian drama Ségryor English drama Off the Railswhich is considered to be the new Trainspotting.

It takes place in lazy Guilford, England, where two friends are having fun with daring parkour tricks. They dream of millions of followers on social media, but their current lives are framed by the death of their best friend.

A diverse mix of images based on real events and dynamic documentaries will bring the music film competition. Among other things, it will feature a new song by Fatih Akin Honey of the Rhinewhich chronicles the turbulent fortunes of rapper Xatar, who first rose to fame as a drug dealer before listening to his father’s conductor genes and turning to music.

An image Meet Me In The Bathroom is in turn an adaptation of the book of the same name about the New York rock scene at the beginning of the millennium.

The selection also includes original sci-fi dramas Gravitation by Cédric Ida, in which social gangsters from Parisian housing estates meet with the atmosphere of von Trier’s Melancholia. His hero, runner Daniel, trains on an oval near a housing estate where his wheelchair-bound brother sells drugs.

So far, eight planets are aligned in the sky, which could have unprecedented consequences for the Earth’s gravity itself. “All this with the unique music of the siblings Jevgenija and Saša Galperinová,” adds Šafránek.

The film shone in Cannes The worst ones directors Lisa Akoky and Romane Gueret, who won the Un certain regard section with him. It takes place in Cité Picasso in Boulogne-Sur-Mer in the north of France, where the film is to be shot. During the casting, four teenagers are selected for the film, and everyone in the neighborhood wonders why the filmmakers chose “only the worst” of all the possible ones.

The award for best director at the same festival went to Alexandru Belc for Romanian Retro metronome. This also takes place at the beginning of the 70s, this time in Bucharest. Seventeen-year-old Ana dreams of love and freedom, and during a party she and her friends decide to write a letter to the Metronom music program, which is secretly broadcast by the Free Europe station in Romania. However, the secret police burst into the apartment…

In Venice, Italy, in the Orizzonti section, Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel won the award for directing for the film Vera. Actress Vera Gemma plays herself in it as the daughter of the handsome Italian actor Giuliano Gemma, who became famous in spaghetti westerns. Vera lives off the family name, but at the same time she perceives that everyone uses her because of it, so she seeks the meaning of life in helping those who would least expect it.

A new festival element is Fokus focused on the Benelux region. “We emphasize the Benelux as a center of co-productions and proof that even small countries can play the first violin in the film industry,” explains Šafránek.

For example, Robin Pront’s film will be shown Zillion about the creation of an eccentric discotheque in the heart of Antwerp. The film, based on reality, was a hit in Belgium and will convince Czech viewers that the “nineties” were far from wild only here.