Sunday, April 25, 2010

Crossing Europe 2010

As I’m sitting here on the train on my way back to Vienna I can’t help but think: “Wow, what an amazing festival it’s been!”. The festival in question was the 7th edition of what is undoubtedly the cultural highlight of my calendar: the Crossing Europe film-festival taking place in Linz, Upper Austria.

Even though I didn’t manage to see quite as many films as in previous years – I think that record is still 18 or 19 – I’ve never before been so satisfied with the program. Out of the 15 films which I saw since Thursday afternoon only 3 were absolutely disasters and the rest ranged between really good and absolutely amazing. In fact it’s never been harder for me to try and pick my favorite(s).

Having said that I think it’s safe to say that Zvonimir Jurić and Goran Dević definitely deserved winning the jury’s award for Crnci / The Blacks (Croatia). The movie is an excellent and thought-provoking account of a small Croatian special forces unit and its members’ emotional states during the last hours of the war in Yugoslavia.

Other films that I particularly liked were

Three other movies that deserve a special mention are:

  • South (Austria) for the filmmakers dedicating 12 years of their life to making it happen.
  • Kynodontas / Dogtooth (Greece) for being seriously, I mean very seriously disturbing (in that regard it’s right up there with Twentynine Palms which I saw at the first Crossing Europe).
  • Hadewijch (France) for simply being the most pointless and boring movie I have seen in my entire life.

(Incidentally I just found out that Twentynine Palms and Hadewijch are from the same writer/director…)

Apart from the movies itself the overall atmosphere at Crossing Europe is always awesome. I met a lot of people which I hadn’t since last year’s festival and a number of interesting folks from all around Europe.

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed Crossing Europe 2010 and would like to thank all the people who made it happen!

You can find more information about Crossing Europe on the festival’s Web site, its blog and via @crossingeurope on Twitter.

P.S. Oh, and don’t forget about Crossing Europe 2011 taking place from April 12 through 17, 2011;-)

Monday, April 19, 2010

Jeff Jarvis @ TEDxNYed: This is bullshit

One of my favorite ways to spend spare time in the past 3 years has been to watch talks given at the annual TED conference. More recently TED has established a new format called TEDx which has enabled independent groups to organize TED-styled conferences all around the world. At one of these gatherings Jeff Jarvis gave a a great talk called “This is bullshit” and I’d thoroughly recommend watching it since it contains a lot of interesting thoughts and spot-on observations on both education and the news-media:


Wednesday, April 7, 2010

this i don’t believe

Normally I use Twitter to share links but this comic from atheistcartoons.com which I just found via Google Reader Play is just too good not to be reposted here:

thisidontbelieveSource

Friday, April 2, 2010

Un jour... à Paris... ensembles pour OLPC et Sugar...

Back in mid-May 2009 many members of the European and North American Sugar and OLPC communities followed OLPC France’s invitation to attend Sugar Camp 2009 in Paris. As expected the meeting turned out to be a great success and it was literally one of the best weekends I had in 2009.

Laurence Buchmann, a French filmmaker, documented Sugar Camp 2009 by interviewing many participants and filming some of the activities going on there. The resulting 13 minute video called “Un jour... à Paris... ensembles pour OLPC et Sugar...” was now posted over on dailymotion.com and I think it gives a great insight into and overview of both the Sugar project itself and the larger Sugar and OLPC communities.