Adina Brădeanu invites KineDok Romania audiences to talks about Eastern European audiovisual heritage

What better time to launch KineDok’s very first programme made entirely of archive films than the week in which we celebrated The World Day for Audiovisual Heritage (October 27) – a UNESCO initiative that celebrates the essential role that audiovisual archives play in the history and culture of humanity?

The programme “Shadows of History” invites audiences to explore four documentary shorts preserved in the archives of each KineDok partner country – the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and Romania – and to reflect on the archive as both an affirmation and an interrogation of collective memory.

What connects these films, very different in aesthetics and rhythm, is not only their reference to a shared regional history, but also the way each opens a conversation around the notion of “heritage” – understood as a material or immaterial inheritance left by previous generations. The programme raises questions about the present’s access to history, the vulnerability of material heritage, the perishable memory of the past as its witnesses disappear, and the authority and credibility of audiovisual archives – questions that the audiences are invited to explore in conversation with Adina Brădeanu, the programme’s curator.

Shadows of History includes the following films:

A Gifted Town (Město darované, d. Vladimir Kressl, Czechoslovakia, 1965, 11 mins)

Inhabitants of Castles (Kastélyok lakói, d. Judit Elek, Ungaria, 1966, 28 mins)

Let Our Voices Be Heard (Nek se čuje i naš glas, d. Krsto Papić, Yugoslavia, 1970, 16 mins)

The Journals of Hrib (Letopisețul lui Hrib, d. Slavomir Popovici, Romania, 1974, 14 mins)

November schedule:

November 2, 11:30 AM, Bârlad, at the "Vasile Pârvan" Museum

November 6, 6:00 PM, Galați, at the Visual Arts Museum

November 12, 5:00 PM, Botoșani, at Unirea Cinema

November 13, 7:00 PM, Suceava, at Spațiul Cilindru / Un concept Luna Association

November 24, 7:30 PM, Bucharest, at the Czech Centre / Documentary Mondays

Adina Brădeanu is a researcher and curator working between Romania and the UK. In Romania, she has curated, since 2013, the public history project VINTAGE SAHIA, developed in collaboration with the One World Romania Association. So far, the project has included public screenings, a series of thematic DVDs and an online platform. In the UK, she completed a PhD at the University of Westminster (London) on the institutional culture of the documentary film studio of socialist Romania, “Alexandru Sahia”. Currently, she is Research Associate with the hISTROX project, developed by the Faculty of Linguistics of the University of Oxford, drawing on a body of heritage audio and photo material produced among the Istro-Romanian communities of the Istrian Peninsula and donated to the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford.