EPA! Film Week: Basque Cinema in Amsterdam, 30 May – 2 June

EPA! Film Week aims to bring attention to and provide showings of contemporary Basque cinema. In the Filmhuis Cavia – an independent, single-screen cinema at Van Hallstraat 52, to the west of Amsterdam’s centre, accessed via a courtyard; which shows foreign and classic films each week, typically from Wednesday to Friday, and has a small bar – ten feature lengths and eight shorts by Basque directors, and viewing in various ways Basque culture, will be shown from this evening until late on Sunday.

EPA! Film Week is a new, non-profit endeavour, achieved by a small team comprising six young men and women: four from the Basque region, and two from Amsterdam. I believe ‘Epa!’ in Basque – and in Spanish – roughly translates to something like ‘Hey!’, but I won’t bear a grudge if someone reads this and corrects me.

The film week will commence at 7 pm this evening with a showing of Amerikanuak, a documentary about Basque immigrants living in the USA, directed by Nacho Reig and released in 2010. Other films during the event’s four days will include Bertsolari, about traditional, improvised Basque song; a documentary about the Basque rock band Zuloak; and Aupa Etxebeste!, which carries on the EPA! website this promising synopsis:

Just before the Etxebeste family leaves on holiday they discover they are broke. To keep up appearances, they decide to spend their holiday locked inside the house while everyone believes they are away.

There will be a fiesta with live music from 10.30 pm on Saturday evening; with the event coming to a close late Sunday with the showing of the audience’s favourite short. The EPA! Film Week website is at: http://www.epafilmweek.com/

29th Imagine Film Festival

The 29th Imagine Film Festival is underway in Amsterdam, having opened yesterday evening, and extending until next Wednesday, 17 April. When the festival began, its ‘Weekends of Terror’ saw it focusing on European horror films. The scope of the festival broadened through the 80s and 90s, and today it features a global selection of films from the fantasy, science fiction and horror genres; with a strong showing of Japanese animation; a series of shorts; and movies from Bollywood.

This year, over sixty screenings will take place as the festival settles in to its new home at EYE, the Dutch Film Institute on the north bank of the IJ. Films will be shown in three of EYE’s four cinemas: EYE 1, EYE 2, and EYE 4. The festival’s roots remain and are upheld in the ‘Night of Terror’ which will commence from midnight on Saturday at the Tuschinski: a four-film marathon will comprise Stitches, The Last Exorcism Part II, Evil Dead, and Sawney: Flesh of Man.

Imagine is a member of EFFFF, the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation. Aside from all the film showings, the festival includes seminars, and each year confers a Career Achievement Award upon a chosen director. The awarded individual this time around will be the Irish director and writer Neil Jordan; whose many films include The Crying Game and Interview with the Vampire; his most recent and ongoing endeavour the TV series The Borgias.

The Imagine Film Festival website is at: http://www.imaginefilmfestival.nl/en

CinemAsia Film Festival 2013

The sixth edition of the CinemAsia Film Festival begins this evening. Founded in 2003, CinemAsia works with the Asian community in the Netherlands to show a collection of contemporary films, made both within Asia and by Asian directors active abroad. This year’s event will run across four days, from today until Sunday, 7 April; with films being shown in the Great Hall and Small Hall of De Balie – the café and cultural centre just off the Leidseplein.

A screening of Xu Zheng’s 2012 comedy, Lost in Thailand, will open the festival this evening at 7:30 pm. Lost in Thailand has become since its release last year the biggest film in Chinese box office history – a significant feat particularly in a market often dominated by historical and action pictures. Twenty-three other films will be shown across the festival’s duration, before Lost in Thailand returns to close proceedings at 9:10 pm on Sunday night. The festival also boasts a karaoke evening on Friday night, with workshops and forums held across the weekend.

The CinemAsia Film Festival website, via which tickets may be procured, is at: http://www.cinemasia.nl/index.php?lang=en

And here is the festival’s trailer:

French Cinema at De Uitkijk

De Uitkijk is one of my favourite of the cinemas I’ve been to in Amsterdam: with its small café leading onto a single screen, fairly narrow, with reddened walls and deep seats angled up towards the projection, it is relaxed and reminds me of some of the independent cinemas about the Place de la Sorbonne which I visited when in Paris. Suitably, therefore, in accord with my conception of it, De Uitkijk runs a regular series of French films. Entitled ‘The Masters of Cinema’, and in collaboration with Maison Descartes and the Institut Francais of the Netherlands, De Uitkijk shows a film by a French director every second and fourth Tuesday of the month.

Last Tuesday, the film was L’Année dernière à Marienbad, or Last Year at Marienbad – the 1961 French film directed by Alain Resnais, from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet; with its angular, ambivalent yet fluent depiction of our desires, thought processes and memories. Continuing with Resnais, next Tuesday – a week tomorrow – his elegant 1974 film Stavisky… will show.

De Uitkijk cinema is on Prinsengracht, just a street down from the Leidseplein. The programme for ‘The Masters of Cinema’ is at: http://www.uitkijk.nl/evenementen/s%C3%A9rie-les-ma%C3%AEtres-du-cinema