Selection of Eastern European Cold War-era sci-fi movies set for Tartu Elektriteater in May
Stalking Eastern Europe, a film festival of science fiction movies from Cold War-era Eastern Europe, is set to take place at Tartu Elektriteater from May 6th to 12th.
The connecting themes of the film program are space and alien planets in the near or distant future. The films span from 1959 to 1988, a period characterized by the Iron Curtain separating the Eastern and Western blocs and marked by the space race between the two superpowers, the USA and the Soviet Union. The films showcased were (co)produced in countries that fell victim to Soviet communist colonialism – Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Estonia, Poland, and Romania.
The program includes the first screening in Estonia of the Polish cult film by director Andrzej Żuławski “On the Silver Globe” (1988), restored in 2016. Additionally, influential works like “Ikarie XB 1” (1963) and “Inquest of Pilot Pirx” (1978) are part of the lineup, along with curiosities such as East German films with strong sexual undertones, like “Love 2002” (1972).
“The 20th-century development of Eastern Europe was akin to sinking into a dystopia of utopian visions of the future. This is reflected in the film selection in one way or another,” said one of the program’s curators Siim Angerpikk. “The films intertwine several seemingly conflicting perspectives: criticism of capitalism and Western desires, the quest for cosmic equality and a culturally imperialist view, belief in technological progress and yet fear of it. But, just as the universe is full of everything imaginable and unimaginable, these films come from their world, bringing us strange visions of the future from the past.”
Stalking Eastern Europe is part of the International Literary Festival Prima Vista: “Futures Better and Worse”, which is in the European Capital of Culture Tartu 2024 main program.
Each screening will be enriched by guests, who will discuss the films and their themes. Among the guests are space psychologist Andres Käosaar, science fiction literature expert Jüri Kallas, and several renowned science fiction scholars, who will also be attending the international science fiction researchers’ conference “Transitions”, which takes place in Tartu at the same time.
According to Eva Näripea, director of the Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia and the co-curator of the program, the legacy of Eastern European science fiction cinema offers fun, retro entertainment, enjoyable aesthetic experiences, and thought-provoking viewing. “These films reflect the fears and hopes of the time, many of which are still relevant today, such as humanity’s relationship with technology, including artificial intelligence. Although the ideological context of production has left its mark on Eastern European science fiction, almost every film also contains aspects criticizing repressive regimes, because under the cover of an inherently unrealistic genre, it was possible to say more than with some other forms of expression that directly depicted surrounding reality,” Näripea commented on the program. “Certainly, it is an exciting and perhaps unexpected discovery that many of the works included in the Stalking Eastern Europe program did not imitate Western models, but offered inspiration to films considered absolute classics of science fiction cinema today with their fresh visual language and innovative narrative styles.”
Stalking Eastern Europe has been produced with the Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia. The program is supported by The Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the University of Tartu Institute of Cultural Research, the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Tallinn, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Tallinn, and the Embassy of Romania in the Republic of Estonia.