A report from the sixteenth goEast Festival of Central and Eastern
European Film, which took place at the historic Caligari FilmBühne in Wiesbaden, Germany. Supported by the German Film Institute (Deutsches Filminstitut DIF) in Frankfurt, goEast originated in 2001 as a cross-cultural initiative designed to popularize East Central European cinema in the West, an effort which was then aligned with the European unification project focused on incorporating the post- Communist countries into the European family. Today, as the festival continues to cast its gaze eastward, it is no longer the expansion of the European Union that provides its political framework. Rather, this year's edition was more impacted by the questions surrounding the future existence of the European Union itself, whose members had recently refused to act in solidarity to address the ongoing refugee crisis, with some even contemplating exit strategies. Intensifying nationalism and resurgent xenophobia were directly mentioned by a number of goEast organizers as forces that the festival is actively seeking to oppose.
The Crisis of Democracy: An East-Central European Perspective