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Canberra Today 12°/16° | Saturday, March 30, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Arts / Love and other bruises

THE 9th “Windows on Europe Film Festival” showcases 16 new films from the member states of the European Union, many to be seen in Australia for the first time.

Mathieu Ravier, the festival’s French-Australian programmer, has chosen to begin his “fabulous festival” unconventionally with a documentary, Johannes Holzhausen’s “The Great Museum”, described as “an elegant love letter to great art”.

A different kind of love is explored in the Spanish relationship drama “10,000 KM”, where Alex heads for Los Angeles pursuing her photography career, leaving Barcelona and her boyfriend Sergi 10,000 kilometres behind her.

Europe may be harmonious, but it’s still full of visual variety, as we see in “Cathedrals of Culture”, 3D documentary portraits of buildings by filmmakers such as Wim Wenders, Robert Redford and Michael Madsen.

Feature films dominate as usual with glamour and reality coming face to face in the French comedy-drama “The Courtyard”, starring Catherine Deneuve and Gustave Kervern as eccentric social isolates.

But according to the ambassador of the European Union to Australia, Sem Fabrizi, the central theme this year will be youth, with young characters “asserting their identity in the face of tradition, change and modernity”.

There’s the surreal Romanian comedy “Domestic”, where children, adults and mostly animals try to get on together in an apartment block.

In Hungary’s “Land of Storms”, a young footballer returns home after quitting his promising football career in Germany and begins a relationship with a stonemason from a nearby town.

Ravier has programmed in a set of Scandinavian coming-of-age dramas from Sweden, Finland and Denmark, where the violent crime film “Northwest” is set.

In an impoverished multi-ethnic area of Copenhagen, 18-year-old Casper lives with his mum, carrying out small-time break-ins for Jamal, but when he moves on to work for Björn, revenge sets in.

“Windows On Europe Film Festival”, Dendy, November 24-30, bookings to dendy.com.au and program at eurofilmfest.com.au

 

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Helen Musa

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