12nd Jameson Cinefest – Miskolc International Film Festival

The 12th edition of Jameson CineFest Miskolc International Film Festival took place from 11–20 September at the ‘House of Arts’ cultural complex in the centre of Miskolc, the biggest city in north-eastern Hungary and the fourth-largest in the country as a whole. The Festival Director is Tibor Bíro and the chief programmer is Géza Csákvári (although in Hungarian orthography their names are written Bíro Tibor and Csákvári Géza). This year the festival included 19 fictional feature-length films in its main competition–the top prizes of which, named in honour of locally-born cinematic luminaries Adolph Zukor and Emeric Pressburger, went to Sean Baker’s Tangerine (USA) and Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang (Turkey/France, in co-production with Germany and Qatar). Most screenings were very well-attended, at a festival where admission is free to all films and events and no tickets are printed.  

Additional programmes of documentaries, shorts and animations were presented, alongside a small retrospective of classic westerns including the festival’s curtain-raiser, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) by Sergio Leone. The opening ceremony included a personal appearance by the film’s top-billed star, Italian legend Claudia Cardinale, and the following day a seminar was held on the past, present and future of the western genre featuring members of FIPRESCI from Hungary and further afield. Another seminar was held at the House of Arts later the same day in honour of FIPRESCI’s 90th anniversary, during which the current challenges facing worldwide film-critics were discussed and analysed.  

For the fourth time, a FIPRESCI jury was invited by the festival–Miskolc is the only festival in Hungary to have a jury of international critics in this way–and their prize was bestowed upon a contemporary reworking of the western, Radu Jude’s 19th-century-set Romanian production Aferim! President of the Hungarian film-critics within FIPRESCI, Professor György Báron oversaw and introduced a wreath-laying ceremony at the birthplace of Emeric Pressburger, co-director of numerous cinematic landmarks including The Red Shoes, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus and A Canterbury Tale. (Neil Young)

Jameson Cinefest – Miskolc International Film Festival: www.cinefest.hu