Watauga Global Community expands classroom instruction with a Friday afternoon Film Series for students enrolled in Investigations: Global, the spring core class for all Watauga freshmen. Most of the selected films look at how ethnicity plays a role in the Communist and Post-Communist societies of Eastern Europe; some focus on Communism and its effect on the lives of people.
Ethnicity and Transition in Eastern Europe
Fridays, 3:00 PM, Great Hall, Living and Learning Center
In the 17th century, a Bulgarian Christian region is selected by the Ottoman rulers to serve as an example of conversion to Islam. A Janissary who was kidnapped from the village as a boy is sent to force the reluctant inhabitants to convert. The Turkish governor seeks a peaceful solution, but ultimately torture, violence, and rebellion break out. Bulgaria, 1988, 158 min.
A nurse and her surgeon-lover are part of a resistance movement in 1940s Czechoslovakia. When they are discovered, her lover flees and she must find a place to hide. A patient whose life she saved, a man from a remote mountain village where time stopped 150 years ago, agrees to hide her as his wife. Czech Republic/ Slovakia, 2003, 150 min.
In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives. Germany, 2007, Best Foreign Film Oscar, 137 min.
In 1990, to protect his fragile mother from a fatal shock after a long coma; a young man must keep her from learning that her beloved nation of East Germany as she knew it has disappeared. Germany, 2003, 121 min.
The film is set in Communist Romania in the final years of the Nicolae Ceauşescu era. It tells the story of two students, roommates in the university dormitory, who try to arrange an illegal abortion. Romania, 2007, 113 min.
In her search for the true origins of a haunting melody, the filmmaker travels to Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia, Serbia and Bulgaria. The trip is filled with humor, suspense, tragedy and surprise as each country's citizens passionately claim the song to be their own and can even furnish elaborate histories for its origins. Bulgaria, documentary, 2003, 70 min.
The film tells the comical story of 10-year-old Zoran who lives in an overcrowded apartment and is obsessed with Yugoslavia’s charismatic leader Marshall Tito. While on a walking tour of Tito’s homeland, Zoran discovers the strength of true friendship, and the importance of his love for his family. Yugoslavian (Serbian), 1992, 104 min.
The documentary reveals a vivid portrait of Kosova’s conditions after eight years of UN intervention: the security, the enduring pain and the struggle for independence. USA, 2007, 60 min.
Bosnia and Herzegovina during 1993 at the time of the heaviest fighting between the two warring sides. Two soldiers from opposing sides in the conflict, Nino and Ciki, become trapped in no man's land, whilst a third soldier is becomes a living booby trap. Bosnia, 2001, 98 min.
Bucharest 1989. Last year of Ceausescu's dictatorship. Eva, 17, lives with her parents and her 7 year-old brother Lalalilu. One day at school, Eva and her boyfriend accidentally break a bust of Ceausescu. They are forced to confess their crime before a disciplinary committee. Eva is expelled from school and transferred to a reformatory establishment. Romania, 2006, 110 min.
Stolen Eyes deals with a dark chapter in Bulgarian history, when, in 1985, the government of Todor Zhivkov decided to "Bulgarianize" its Turkish minority by outlawing Turkish names, customs, language and dress, and follows an unlikely love story that develops against this traumatic backdrop. Bulgaria, 2005, 112 min.
Grbavica is a film about the life of a single mother in contemporary Sarajevo in the aftermath of systematic rapes of Bosniak women by Serbian troops during the war. Bosnia, 2006, 90 min.
A young French man travels to Romania in search of a legendary Gypsy singer, whom his father had heard all the time before his death. He then falls in love with an attractive and high-strung Gypsy dancer. France, 1997, 102 min.
