International Film Festival for Children and Youth in Zlín, also known as Zlín Film Fest, is one of the world's oldest and biggest film festivals for youth and children.
Founded in 1961 in the Czech Republic, the festival celebrated its 56th edition by packing its line-up with 361 titles from 56 countries, screening 135 films in premieres for the domestic audience. Three awards, the Children's Jury Award, the Audience Award and the Ecumenical Jury Award, were taken home by the Israeli family monster film Abulele. Directed by Jonathan Geva, it's a story about a bullied boy and his clandestine friendship with an ancient monster called Abulele.
Among the plethora of titles, ScreenAnarchy looked closer at the international competition of European debuts.
Click through the gallery to read more and watch the trailers for the films!
Zhaleika
Directed by Eliza Petkova
German screenwriter and director Eliza Petkova, of Bulgarian origin, wandered around a Bulgarian countryside to shoot her first feature outing Zhaleika. Although films with child protagonists seem to be almost by default labeled as coming-of-age fares, Zlín Film Fest's selection explores various topics and motifs.
In Zhaleika, the topic is individual versus society and the unwillingness to be tamed by the whip of conformity. Protagonist Lora, 17, enjoys life, listening to music and going out with her boyfriend to her parents' chagrin. Ripped jeans attract undesired attention in a small conservative society but Lora continues to live her life on her own terms.
After the surprising death of her father, the tension between her and the rest of the village escalates as the society wants her to mourn properly, to act as a victim, as her mother does. However, she refuses to switch into the mourning regime for everybody to see and pity her, which eventually leads to an ostracization.
The director chooses a strong theme, although opting for subtle execution, carefully pacing the rhythm of narration. Since gender is an issue in the filmmaking industry, a female filmmaker following a female protagonist who does not want to surrender her personality for old-fashioned customs springboards the discreet, almost bucolic story into a poignant current topic. However, Petkova keeps a low-key charm throughout the film featuring small gestures, sleepy village, and an anti-climax of a finale. All the inconspicuousness makes Zhaleika even more intriguing.
I, Olga Hepnarova
Directed by Petr Kazda and Tomas Weinreb
Talking about strong debuts, Czech Republic has had a couple of them lately and one of the recent ones even opened the Panorama section at this year's Berlinale.
Tomas Weinreb and Petr Kazda worked on their shared feature debut over the course of six years and the multi-layered film is a glowing testament to their labor. I, Olga Hepnarova is a personal interpretation by the directors and screenwriters of the short-lived life of the eponymous protagonist, who was hanged at the age of 22 as the last woman to receive capital punishment in Czechoslovakia.
Olga entered the history books on 10 July 1973 when she killed eight people, a retribution for what society has done to her. Weinreb and Kazda also traveled the road of individual versus society, however, through the personal perspective of one girl who did not fit into conventional brackets, felt like it and acted like it.
I, Olga Hepnarova is a subjective interpretation, even though well-researched. The filmmakers call the film an existential drama. It explores existentialism in a meticulously framed style. It also investigates other themes, such as the life of the sexual minority under the Communist rule.
Thirst
Directed by Svetla Tsortsorkova
The debut of Bulgarian filmmaker Svetla Tsortsorkova has been making the rounds of the festival circuit, building buzz and winning a couple of awards. Thirst has a simple premise of a family whose life is soon disrupted by a father-and-daughter team of diviner and well-digger.
The family -- a teenage son, a mother and a father -- live in a house atop a hill earning a living from washing sheets for hotels. It's work that seems to suck the life out of the mother, since the father, a survivor of two heart attacks, cannot work that much. As the washing is the only source of income, the water is crucial for business. Living in a higher altitude, however, they have low pressure for water. Thus enters the well-digger, whose arrival along with her daughter brings more than just a hole full of water.
Although Thirst sounds a bit like the type of film where an alien force disrupts the fragile balance in the microcosmos, Tsortsorkova takes a different way to proceed and manages to deliver a different result than Pasolini´s Teorema and its derivatives. The title is a clever figurative camouflage for an array of needs each and everyone of the five characters represents.
Taking into consideration its rather ascetic setting and characters, the filmmaker addresses several issues and with surprisingly dramatic verve, considerig the chamber-scale of the story. As opposed to Petkova´s Zhaleika, small gestures conjure up big ideas in a spectrum of emotions, crowned by a blazing finale.
Shot in light-saturated widescreen photography, Thirst is a moving fable rigorously kept within the boundaries of social realism, making the effort and its achievement even more daring and rewarding.
Montanha
Directed by Joao Salaviza
Portuguese writer-director Joao Salaviza´s feature debut Montanha follows 14-year old David in a slice of his life, passing through a school of hard knocks. A loose coming-of-age structure is framed around the imminent death of David's grandfather. Since David's mother spends all her free time in a hospital, there is nobody looking after David.
The apparent lack of rigor exercised by his otherwise loving father plays a major role in David's upbringing and the (wrong) attitude he assumes. Since his other role model in masculine dealing with the world is dying, the young and inexperienced protagonist has to make sense of the world by himself.
Salaviza builds the narrative over a rather loose structure, copying David´s uncontrolled drifting through life and, more importantly, emotional imbalance. For all the macho pose, David is still only a frail and frightened child on the inside. Montanha comes packing the usual ingredients, as expected from a coming-of-age tale -- friendship and love -- although Salaviza operates the motifs carefully so as not to slide down into a sentimental mud. Montanha proves to be a musing on premature manhood.
My Name is Emily
Directed by Simon Fitzmaurice
The Irish filmmaker Simon Fitzmaurice debuts with a surprising coming-of-age road film, My Name is Emily. After Emily's mother dies, the eccentricities of his father, wonderfully played by Michael Smiley, earns him a straight-jacketed ride to an asylum.
Emily, an interim orphan, is ostracized at school and develops a strong affection for an existential perspective on life He even flirts with suicide. Fitzmaurice, similarly to Salaviza, observes an emotionally-damaged child struggling to make sense of life. However, where the Portuguese filmmaker proceeds to do so in the vein of grittier realism, Fitzmaurice fiddles with genre conventions, squeezing melodrama and a road movie into a coming-of-age bracket.
Fitzmaurice seems to go down the Jaco van Dormael rabbit hole, tackling the style in which the Belgian filmmaker made his own poetics -- the double-edged sword of subversiveness and sentimentality -- whereas Fitzmaurice trades the subversiveness for existentialism and the gloomy Schopenhauer-like worldview.
Although the Irish director, unlike van Dormael, unspools the mood-building style in a linear fashion -- from existentialism to sentimentality -- thus using it as a framing device for the whole story. My Name is Emily is a crowd-pleasing drama, something like Uberto Pasolini´s Still Life (2013) for a teen audience and their parents.
Occasionally, fragments that sound like a motivational speech sneak into the lines of the teen heroine Emily, something about being struck down on knees and never giving up and moving on, those type of cathartic and uplifting elements that did not really work in Still Life. The reason why they do in My Name is Emily is because the film itself is a testament to Fitzmaurice´s never-giving-up attitude. It's also, really, a paragon, being the first feature film in the world made by a director suffering from motor neurone disease, lending the whole experience a new dimension.
Departure
Directed by Andrew Steggall
Andrew Steggall directs a family drama revolving around a disintegration in the South of France, where 15-year old Elliot and his mother are getting their cottage ready for selling. Steggall reaches for a Teorema-like device, using the nonchalant French boy to stir up the family situation.
Elliot develops a thing for poetry and theatre and Clément, while his mother suffocates in a loveless marriage only moments from crashing and burning. The setting of the French countryside idyll matches well with the lyrical tone of the film. The character of Elliot occupies most of the screen time. He's a pretentious teenager whose self-absorbed demeanor reaches beyond the point of annoying and plays into the hands of Juliet Stevenson, who excels in the role of a mother suffering in a marriage stuck at a very dead end.
Her performance becomes the centerpiece of the film as Steggall continues into the vivisection of an irreparably damaged relationship, mostly by the attitude of one of its founders. Meanwhile, the director slyly camouflages the primary topic of Departure, which is, at heart, a tale of teenage sexual awakening.
Sanctuary
Directed by Marc Brummund
The German film Sanctuary directed by Marc Brummund and inspired by real events, sees a teenager struggling for freedom and dignity after he is sent into a reeducation facility.
In the era of bell-bottoms in 1968, 14-year-old Wolfgang is a wild child despising authorial figures, his step-father the most. The rebelliousness and humiliations of his step-father, as well as a jealousy his step-father harbors towards the affectionate mother-son relationship, earns Wolfgang a sojourn in Freistatt – an institution designed to tame wild spirits through prison-like treatment.
Hard labor and physical punishments are on the daily menu, an explosive combination boiling up rage in Wolfgang. Brummund builds the story as a gripping thriller, not short of startling twists and turns, such as a juvenile prison break.
The director documents the reeducation process -- the film was shot in the actual Freistatt -- and shares sad stories of Freistatt inmates whose parents left them there for good. He also covers parent-child dynamics in a family where the son is caught in the throes of more primal urges. Brummund also develops the 'one versus system' scenario on the workings of an oppressive mechanism and its silent tolerance from society.
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