I had never been to Athens or Split, or even set foot in their respective countries, before taking part in The 5C Project. Yet, when I first heard about the project, Tirana was the one place I was most excited to visit. I may never get another shot at going to Albania, I remember thinking. …
Category: Sendrea Andrei
Belgrade Film(E)scape
It was all quite unexpected, like an extra mid-credits scene in a superhero movie. Belgrade was a surprising extra stop in The 5C Cine Caravan across the Balkans, an event organized by Nevena Dakovic and Aleksandra Milovanovic, two professors from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts. We had all met Aleksandra Milovanovic at Divan Film Festival …
What happens in Cetate stays in Cetate
Ok, maybe the title is a bit of a clickbait, the 5 critics didn’t kill any bad filmmakers in Cetate. The real meaning would be this: there is no festival like Divan, and what happens there would be impossible to replicate in another place or festival. I’ve been going there for the last three years …
Splitski Akvarel – Beauty is in the (defect) eye of the beholder
There is a special quality that only short films can attain, and that very few of them do. It doesn’t mean the rest of them are bad – though it does mean that those who do are good. For lack of a better term I’ll name this quality conceptualization and place it at a crossroads …
An observational fiction on remorse and redemption – Correction by Thanos Anastopoulos
Thanos Anastopoulos’s second feature is a riddle that keeps the spectator wandering till the very end. Fresh out of prison, a man in his late thirties starts stalking a young single mother all over Athens: film logic and experience would have us guess he is the husband/ father in this equation and now he wants …
My film(s) in Split
There is a Romanian expression that translates something like “the films in your head”, meaning the way you perceive something happened, or the way you want/ fear it will happen. I have a more literal approach to this (as most people who spend a lot of their time watching films do): I look at people …
When cinematography is more than camerawork
A reflection on Olympia Mytilinaiou’s masterclass that turned into an impromptu review In 2013 I was in a film journalism workshop at the Venice Film Festival and everybody in my group was talking about this amazing Greek film screening there. I didn’t manage to see it then and it’s bizarre title, Miss Violence, so full …
Film Criticism as a Parasitic Art Form
As I was going through the notes I took during Jean-Michel Frodon’s masterclass on film criticism I realized that… I can’t understand half of them. I mean literally, I have terrible handwriting. Hooked yet? Because this is the first thing that comes to mind from his lecture: captivate your audience from the start, the first …
Andrei about Athens
“I had never traveled to Greece before so I didn’t really know what to expect. I knew of Ouzo and olive oil, gyros and Grexit. And of course about the gods and the heroes, and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle – whose Poetics is still the best scriptwriting manual out there. I fell in love with …
Restoring Wonderful to its Original Meaning
A Wonderful Night in Split / Ta divna Splitska noć (dir. Arsen A. Ostojic, Croatia, 2004) The saying goes that there is no such thing as bad publicity, but A Wonderful night in Split is not exactly the kind of advertising you would want for your summer town on the Adriatic. Shot entirely inside Diocletian’s …