The South East European Film Festival is partnering with Darkroom on a new streaming service option that will bring some of the best in Eastern and Southeastern European cinema to anyone in the U.S. and Canada.
Under the SEEfest Spotlight banner, select titles from the festival will be available on Darkroom as part of premium content on the streaming platform, currently priced at $1.99 a month. Films include:
- The Constitution (Croatia), “both funny and deeply touching story of a gay professor confronting homophobia as well as his own biases.”
- Zana from LA-based Kosovo filmmaker Antoneta Kastrati about the lingering post-conflict tragedies.
- Serbian medical detective story Guardians of the Formula about the first bone marrow transplant during the Cold War years.
- Libertate (Romania), “a long-overdue account of an attack on a police station in Sibiu during the 1989 revolution, a turmoil that spirals into armed clashes between all sides.”
- Valley of Peace, beloved Slovenian WWII drama selected for the Cannes Classics series, starring American John Kitzmiller, who broke through in 1957 to be the first-ever Black actor to win Best Actor Prize at Cannes.
“Darkroom was created to provide a portal for treasures of world cinema, perhaps not easily found on other platforms,” comments Anatol Chavez, principal of Synergetic Films, the distribution company behind Darkroom. “Something like Criterion, but with more recent discoveries. We have worked with SEEfest a long time, and this platform complements that kindred goal of illuminating world cinema.”
SEEfest, which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary in Los Angeles, was founded in 2006 by Vera Mijojlić, film critic and cultural entrepreneur. Mijojlić notes the new streaming platform will allow subscribers to see some of the greatest films ever made, some of them from the early days of the medium.
‘Man with a Movie Camera’
Darkroom
“In the SEEfest Spotlight we also give a shout to a few classic standouts such as 1929 Dziga Vertov’s masterpiece, Man With A Movie Camera,” says Mijojlić, “Sergei Eisenstein’s 1926 Battleship Potemkin, and Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis. With growing number of films in our Spotlight we hope to inspire renewed joy of watching good movies.”
‘Absurdistan’
Darkoom
Among other SEEfest Spotlight titles is Hot Blues in a Cold War, a documentary directed by Antje Dohrn and Victoria Luther about E.B. Davis, a Black GI and Blues musician “sent overseas to West-Berlin, Germany, during the Cold War. He was allowed to play his music on the other side of the wall, conquering the hearts of communists with jazz.” Absurdistan, a comedy directed by German filmmaker Veit Helmer, centers on “two childhood sweethearts who seem destined for one another until the women of their isolated village, angered by male indifference toward the water shortage, go on a sex strike that threatens the young couple’s first night of love.”
Darkroom
The Door, starring Helen Mirren, Károly Eperjes, and Martina Gedeck peers into the strange bond formed between an author and her eccentric maid. The drama is directed by the famed Hungarian filmmaker István Szabó.
Darkroom is available on Roku, Amazon Fire, iOS/AppleTV, and Android TV, with Smart TVs (Samsung, LG, Sony, Vizio, etc.) and gaming consoles to follow. “The name is inspired by ancient practices of shadowgraphy, shadow puppetry, and possibly camera obscura, and in early industrial times magic lanterns and phantasmagoria shows,” the company shares, “continuing with flip books, stroboscopic, and zoetropes, to photography and moving pictures. As technology developed, sound, color and the size of screens changed, but through it all individuals watched the magical effects in a dark room.”
