goEast Film Festival Day One: The Rise of the Hybrids

Is it documentary, is it a fiction? No, it's a hybrid!

To get to goEast, I travelled west through the flatlands of middle Germany on a smooth and frictionless FlixTrain. After four hours I landed in Frankfurt Süd, took a tram to Hauptbahnhof and boarded a windy S-Bahn across endless allotments, the muddy river Main and huge corporate buildings. Just forty minutes west of Germany’s biggest economic hub — and most depressing city — Wiesbaden feels like a different world. It feels like a place you can… slow… down.

With impressive Romanesque buildings, hot water springs, small yet charming parks, Italian restaurants and Irish pubs, and fancy boutique shops, it feels like the perfect city to lose yourself in for a few days. I stopped for a beer and sat outside in the sun while waiting for hotel check-in to open. A man asked me where my clip-on sunglasses were from (Rome). A small conversation, sure, but the kind of thing that doesn’t happen in Berlin. We’re in small-city Germany now.

With so much to see and do — Mainz just across the state border; a casino that inspired Dostoevsky’s The Gambler; places where Elvis took Priscilla on dates — it’s almost a shame I’m here to watch movies. The good news is that in just its first two competition entries, goEast, dedicated to Eastern and Central European cinema, already feels like a festival with a strongly defined point of view. 

Read the rest over at JourneyIntoCinema.com.