The results of the series of workshops Passport Control, organized by the irrepressible Mediawave, will be ready for your ears at various times throughout the festival but there’ll also be an ear-bending array of other music from the region.
The gigs include: Penguin Sound System and Méhkas Dia Project, performing a set based upon the music from German and Italian adult films, British gangster film soundtracks and Hungarian popular songs; the hippy alternative style of Eszter Takáts and the Gumizsuzsi; the sweet music of Melinda Maul; avante garde noodling from the Eastern Boundary Trio; blue times with Arrabona Blues Breakers; the Czech-Japanese collaboration of Pavel Fajt & Yumiko Ishijima; and the brilliantly named up-and-coming Maskura and the Cricket Swarm.
Information Films
There are, of course, more films to see than just those in competition. There will be a selection of shorts, as well as the following information films dotted throughout the program. In Para, the festival’s opening film, our hero Lajos, an ex-policeman, returns from death and characteristically ends up with a large debt to his employer and underworld associate Mr. Faragó.
Shadows, tells the story of Lazar Perkov, a man who has everything going for him, so much so everyone calls him “Lucky.” Nothing’s missing – except maybe Lucky himself, who’s always trying to live up to the expectations of others. I Love, You Love is the story of two friends: a success and a failure. Following a drunken binge the “success” dies, leaving his pregnant girlfriend alone. The “failure” decides, through loyalty to his dead friend, to take on responsibility for her and the child.
4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days, is the harrowing story of Otilia and Gabita, university students in small town in Romania during the last years of communism. Otilia rents a room in a cheap hotel. In the afternoon, they are going to meet a certain Mr. Bebe. Gabita is pregnant, abortion is illegal and neither of them has gone through anything like this before.
The Counterfeiters, is set in the middle of 1942, and tells the tale of Jewish graphic artists in the Sachsenhausen Camp who, by command of Hitler, were made to produce counterfeit dollars and pounds, with the aim of destroying the Allies financially. Tricks takes place in the summer holidays. Stefek lives with his mother and sister in a small town somewhere in Poland. His father disappeared years ago. One day Stefek sees a man getting on the same train as him and decides he is actually his father. Two in One, has two parts: in one an actor in a theatre hangs himself and a stage worker gets entwined in his story, while in the other an old womanizer cannot cope with loneliness.