MADE IN EU
MADE IN EU
Stephan Komandarev
BG/CZ/DE / 2025 / 102 min
At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bulgarian seamstress Iva hides her illness to keep her job. When she is identified as the town’s first COVID-19 patient, she is made a scapegoat – first by the factory, then ostracised by her neighbors. A ...
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DUCHOŇ
DUCHOŇ
Peter Bebjak
SK/CZ / 2025 / 99 min
During playback recordings for the 1984 New Year's Eve TV programme, pop star Karol Duchoň misses his cue. A crazy night begins during which his eventful life passes before his eyes. A stirring biopic about the career of the Slovak schlager star, ...
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TWO PROSECUTORS
Два прокурора
Sergej Loznitsa
FR/DE/NL/LV/RO/LT / 2025 / 118 min
The Soviet Union, 1937. The era of the Great Purges. Alexander Kornyev, a young prosecutor and staunch Bolshevik, conducts investigations at a provincial prison: a prisoner there appears to have been unjustly imprisoned. Yet slowly but surely, the ...
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PALEONTOLOGY LESSON
PALEONTOLOGY LESSON
Sergei Loznitsa
NL / 2025 / 12 min
The Natural History Museum in Kiev in June 2023. War dominates the conversations of four women in an anteroom. Then a primary school class streams in, and the children embark on a journey to meet mammoths, Stone Age people, and pufferfish. For a ...
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THE INVASION
THE INVASION
Sergej Loznitsa
NL/FR / 2024 / 145 min
Over the course of a year, Sergei Loznitsa's film crews documented everyday life during the war in Ukraine. In Mykolaiv, people have to fetch water from fire hydrants. In Lviv, even young women learn to handle firearms. A despairing mother mourns her ...
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THE SPRUCE FOREST
PADUREA DE MOLIZI
Tudor Giurgiu
RO / 2025 / 75 min
In April 1941, villagers from Bukovina sought freedom across the border in Romania—and were mowed down by Soviet bullets. THE SPRUCE FOREST recalls this repressed massacre through eyewitness accounts, archival material, and reenactments.
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Brand new films from cult directors who are not in Cottbus for the first time – from Slovakian genre master Peter Bebjak to the historical and contemporary observations of Sergei Loznitsa, Stephan Komandarev and Tudor Giurgiu – all stars of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern European cinema with very different styles, who are at home on international screens with their films that are as astute as they are entertaining.
