Summer cinema program will bring us to Odesa!
Sergei Parajanov’s retrospective, presented by special guest Larysa Kadochnykova, will be a highlight of the Odesa International Cinema Festival (OICF) in 2013
Since 2008, the OICF’s organizing team has been carefully preparing throughout each year for the ten days of July when Odesa becomes the world cinema capital. Without this painstaking behind-the-scenes work, the festival would have never taken off as a brilliant collection of both competitive and out-of-competition programs, nor would it bring happy discoveries and prominent guests to the fore.
The work’s results were the subject of a press conference held by the forum’s organizing team headed by its president Viktoria Tehypko, director-general Denys Ivanov, and art director Oleksandr Shpiliuk, who shared with the press information about grandiose projects of the coming cinema summer in Odesa.
Expansion of the national program, to include all Ukrainian-produced movies of the year, and establishment of two separate prizes will be among major developments at 2013 festival. The prizes will be awarded for the Best Full-Length Film and Best Short Film. It would be great if not only the quantity, but also the quality of Ukrainian films will go up dramatically!
We already know that the main jury will be headed by our famous countryman Oleksandr Rodniansky, formerly known as a documentary filmmaker and now as a successful producer with many worthy projects to his name.
One of the most successful OICF project – the Summer Film School, where students do not only watch good movies, but get real knowledge in leading international filmmakers’ workshops, too – will be continued. We already know that its students will be able to meet Jos Stelling of the Netherlands, Roger Corman from the USA, Czech director Jiri Menzel and Mark Cousins from the UK. By the way, cut-price places at the school are on offer until March 31.
The Potemkin Steps will be engulfed by rousing music of punk-folk band No Smoking Orhestra, led by the OICF’s honorary guest Emir Kusturica, on July 12, the festival’s opening day, and Kusturica will be awarded the prize for his contribution to world cinema on the same day.
Screenings of masterpieces of world cinema on the Potemkin Steps have already become a well-liked feature of the festival program. This year’s program includes Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Sunrise, one of the best ever Hollywood silent films that won three Oscars at the first Academy Awards. The movie was based on the novel A Trip to Tilsit by Hermann Sudermann and is an example of melodrama.
Another highlight of the festival will be Parajanov’s retrospective, presented by the event’s special guest Larysa Kadochnykova. This project, a brainchild of the organizing team, must set the tone for the celebration of the great cinema artist’s 90th birth anniversary. By the way, the festival program and the list of its honored guests are still in works, so The Day. promises to inform our readers about the most interesting developments and interview the brightest movie stars.
