About

 

What is East European Flicks?

It's a project I started in 2019, after seeing The Painted Bird by Václav Marhoul. I realised suddenly that there was room to discuss a common cinematic tendency, related to a geographical area of Europe, and decided that I had seen enough films to start showcasing them on an instagram page. The page is still active, with a small community around it, growing at its pace, but the important thing to me is to have a space to discuss these sort of films, no matter how small it is.

 

 

What is East Europe? 

In the conception of the page, I had to delimitate and oversimplify geographical areas that would fall under the term 'East Europe'. I believe that there indeed is a distinct cultural identity inside Europe that has been dealing with the traumas of the Cold War, and that includes the countries of what once was the eastern block. There's a tendency in these countries to dislike being 'labeled' as 'East Europe', but I want to suggest a positive connotation to the term, that focuses on a cultural continguity between these countries - some of which have been or are currently at war with each other - that becomes very evident in the cinematic form. 

Maybe such an entity as East Europe does not exist, but I believe that east european cinema does. In 2023, I chose to further expand my 'borders' to properly include more cinematic realities that often don't have the right space to be discussed, such as turkish and caucasian cinema, or the baltic countries. 

For transparency, East European Flicks focuses on the following countries and areas: Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, the Balcans, Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijian, Turkey, Estonia, Lettonia, Latvia. 

 

About me

My name is Viktor Tóth. I am hungarian, but was born and raised in Italy, where I still currently live. I studied Foreign Literatures as my bachelor's in Trieste, and am expanding with a master's in Film Studies between Udine and Paris. I am a collaborator at a few italian websites, namely East Journal and ODG Magazine, and have attended regularly as an accredited press member Venice, Berlin, Cannes for the past couple of years.

I have started my journey into cinema through science fiction classics like Star Wars, and one day, through my father, I discovered a soviet film named Solaris, by a certain Andrei Tarkovsky. When I learned that he did another sci-fi, Stalker, and the only way to see it for me at the time was to get the whole box set of his films, that's where my love for arthouse cinema solidified.