GoEast Film Festival: the searing documentaries and big-name features you can watch online

The Wiesbaden-based GoEast film festival is offering a plethora of feature films, documentaries, and experimental shorts for viewers in Germany to watch online between 20 – 26 April.

The festival’s 2021 edition will see the event’s official competition and short film contest run alongside a number of special categories, including the series Homage to Yuri Gagarin, and an Anti-Oscar performance by Romanian contemporary artist Dan Perjovschi.

The Oscar-nominated Srebrenica drama Quo Vadis, Aida? will screen in the Bioscop category, which also features Vitaly Mansky’s biopic Gorbachev. Heaven, and Renata Litvinova’s dark fairytale film on a matriarchy that descends into chaos, The North Wind.

Among the films battling in the main competition, three explore with resistance movements during the Second World War. Vera  Lacková‘s How I Became a Partisan follows a Roma resistance fighter — the director’s grandfather — in Slovakia, while Marta Popivoda’s Landscapes of Resistance tells the story of one of Serbia’s first female partisans. Šarūnas  Bartas’s In the Dusk also debunks myths about Lithuania’s guerrilla fighters, the Forest Brothers.

Must-watch documentaries on the roster include Alina Gorlova’s This Rain Will Never Stop, the story of a Syrian refugee and Red Cross volunteer who finds himself in eastern Ukraine as war breaks out once more. Meanwhile, Romanian director Andrei Dăscălescu’s Holy Father offers a personal take on parenthood, by following a monk who left his son — the film’s director — in order to pursue his religious calling on Greece’s mythological Mount Athos.

Elsewhere in the programme, Preparations To Be Together For an Unknown Period of Time is an intense psychological thriller which sees a Hungarian émigré in the United States give up her prestigious position as a neurosurgeon to return home for an obsessive romance. Upon arriving back in Hungary however, she is faced with a new dilemma when her would-be partner appears not to recognise her.

Find out more about the GoEast Film Festival here.