The fledgling Cinematik Slovakian film festival will celebrate its tenth anniversary by spotlighting Catalan cinema. “Since its inception, the festival has always aimed to discover new cinematic worlds, and the films of the Catalan region are quite unknown, albeit very successful and interesting. In comparison with, for example, Central European cinema, it is completely different; it brings different stories and different poetics,” the festival’s artistic director, Vladimír Štric, explained to Cineuropa to justify why his team has decided to dedicate an entire section to this region of Spain.

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The line-up of contemporary Catalan films consists of the Locarno-awarded Story of My Death [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Albert Serra
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scheda film] and Neus Ballús’ The Plague [+leggi anche:
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scheda film]. The special focus also covers the Cult & Beyond parallel section, through the screening of zombie tetralogy [Rec] [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza
intervista: Julio Fernández
scheda film], the science-fiction thriller The Last Days [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Àlex e David Pastor
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scheda film]. The festival’s guest of honour, Jaime Rosales, will personally accept the Respect Award, and the programmers have taken the opportunity to prepare a retrospective of his works. “Rosales continues in the best European tradition of auteur film; he goes his own way, which in certain aspects has a link to the cinema classics, but is in many ways very innovative, most notably in his film language and the dialogue with the viewers,” adds Štric.

For the fifth time, the Eye on Films support platform for first and second films is collaborating with the festival to prepare a selection of films by up-and-coming filmmakers, such as Eric Cherriere’s dark thriller Cruel [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Stina Werenfels
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intervista: Aik Karapetian
intervista: Roberts Vinovskis
scheda film] and the Michael Powell Award winner Hide and Seek [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], a British indie by Joanna Coates. “We have reduced the number of sections in order to arrange the programme better,” explains the artistic director. “There are two competition sections; the main Meeting Point Europe competition will screen a selection of 11 contemporary European films, picked by 15 European film critics from among the best European movies from mid-2014 to May 2015.”

Meeting Point Europe will present the domestic premiere of Yorgos Lanthimos’ long-awaited dystopian thriller The Lobster [+leggi anche:
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Q&A: Yorgos Lanthimos
scheda film] and Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado’s latest outing, The Salt of the Earth [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], along with Ulrich Seidl’s provocative documentary In the Basement [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] and Céline Sciamma’s drama Girlhood [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Céline Sciamma
intervista: Céline Sciamma
scheda film]. Domestic production will also maintain a solid position within the festival’s programme: the programmers have decided to introduce Peter Bebjak’s third feature, the psychological drama The Cleaner [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Martin Žiaran
intervista: Peter Bebjak
scheda film], as a pre-premiere and to premiere the latest documentary by Matej Mináč, Through the Eyes of the Photographer. Ivan Ostrochovský’s docudrama Koza [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Ivan Ostrochovský
scheda film] and Jakub Kroner’s animated feature Lokalfilmis [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] are also part of the In the House domestic production section.

The Cinematik International Film Festival runs from 10 September until 15 September in the Slovakian spa town of Piešťany.