European Film Treat

All told, 12 films will be shown in six days, one film from each participating country. Many of these productions have won awards at prestigious festivals like Belgium's Simply Friends, winner of numerous trophies at home and in France, Austria's The Inheritors nominated for an Oscar this year, and France's winner of last year's Cannes Festival, Western. At a news conference on the premises, Johannes Ebert, director of the Goethe Institute in Kyiv (one of the festival organizers), stressed that the main criteria in choosing to organize the event and selecting films were creative merit and innovative quality; all the films selected were made within the past five years, mostly last year. In other words, there is every reason to expect that the Kyiv public will appreciate this European film treat. The more so that the organizing committee "tried to select pictures that could attract both the film elite and regular audiences," Mr. Ebert added.

(For more see page Culture)