Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival – The NEN

Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival announces 2026 programme

Fifth anniversary edition runs from 6 October to 7 November 2026 across Scotland with screenings in Glasgow, Cromarty, Edinburgh, Dunfermline and Aberdeen
Rare 35mm screenings, contemporary discoveries, exclusive premieres and anniversary events showcase the breadth of cinema from Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus
Special strands Re-membering the Archive and Love Stories: Eastern European and Caucasian Romance explore memory, identity, migration and romance across the region

Tickets on sale now here

Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival has announced its 2026 programme, marking the festival’s fifth anniversary with its most ambitious and geographically expansive edition to date.

Bringing together some of the most exciting, powerful, thoughtful, strange and visionary filmmaking from Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus, the festival will present screenings, special events, filmmaker conversations and premieres across Glasgow, Cromarty, Edinburgh, Dunfermline and Aberdeen.

The festival opens on 6 October at Glasgow Film Theatre with a new edition of Samizdat’s much-loved animation programme, Politics of the Imagination: Animations of the Eastern Bloc (1958–1992).

Featuring surreal dreamscapes, folk tales, post-apocalyptic visions and allegories of political paranoia, the collection showcases the extraordinary creativity of animators working across the Eastern Bloc during the second half of the twentieth century.

The screening will be preceded by a musical introduction from Ukrainian violinist Masha Zhuravlova and followed by an Opening Night Party at Stereo.

To mark its fifth anniversary, Samizdat has assembled one of its most ambitious and varied programmes to date, combining landmark classics, contemporary discoveries, filmmaker conversations, documentary premieres, experimental cinema and special anniversary events. Highlights include a rare 35mm screening of Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s masterpiece Werckmeister Harmonies, alongside Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s acclaimed psychological drama Mother Joan of the Angels.

A major focus of this year’s programme is Re-membering the Archive, a strand exploring personal and collective histories through photographs, home videos, memory and acts of reconstruction.

Featured works include Klára Tasovská’s I’m Not Everything I Want to Be, built from the remarkable photographic archive of Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková; Maria Stoianova’s Fragments of Ice, which pieces together the story of Ukraine’s transition from the Soviet Union through decades of family VHS recordings; and Otilia Babara’s Love Is Not an Orange, an intimate portrait of migration and motherhood in post-independence Moldova assembled from home videos sent between mothers working abroad and the children they left behind.

The strand also includes Vlad Petri’s Between Revolutions, a compelling blend of archival footage, political history and fictional correspondence spanning Romania and Iran.

Meanwhile, Samizdat’s recurring genre strand returns under the banner Love Stories: Eastern European and Caucasian Romance, presenting three radically different explorations of love, desire and belonging. Audiences can discover Janusz Morgenstern’s rarely screened Polish classic Goodbye, See You Tomorrow, Levan Akin’s acclaimed Georgian drama And Then We Danced, and Anja Koprivšek’s uplifting documentary Grand Prize, which celebrates love, friendship and chosen family within Croatia’s ballroom community.

Contemporary Ukrainian cinema continues to play a central role within the festival. Alongside Fragments of Ice, audiences can experience the UK premiere of Yulia Appen’s A Home for Rita, a tender portrait of an internally displaced Romani family rebuilding their lives after fleeing Russian occupation, as well as a wide selection of Ukrainian works featured throughout the Short Film Competition and other curated programmes.

The festival also presents works that challenge conventional forms and ways of seeing. Armenian double bill After Dreaming and Kafka brings together two films exploring uncertainty, displacement and estrangement, while Marija Nemčenko’s LAK i offers a poetic reflection on home and belonging, weaving together stories of white storks, rural communities and disappearing ways of life in south-east Lithuania. Similar themes are further explored in The Beauty of the Donkey, in which filmmaker Dea Gjinovci returns to Kosovo with her father more than fifty years after his exile, exploring family history, memory and belonging across generations.

Classic cinema also remains at the heart of the programme. Alongside Werckmeister Harmonies, audiences can discover Heat, the remarkable debut feature by acclaimed Ukrainian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko.

Set in the Kazakh steppe during the Soviet Virgin Lands Campaign, the film follows a young graduate whose idealism collides with entrenched hierarchies, revealing the early brilliance of one of Eastern European cinema’s most celebrated directors.

As part of its ongoing commitment to supporting emerging filmmakers, Samizdat’s Short Film Competition returns with fifteen films from across Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus competing for the festival’s Audience Award. This year’s selection spans countries from Poland and Ukraine to Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, bringing together animation, documentary and fiction works from some of the region’s most exciting contemporary voices.

To celebrate its fifth birthday, the festival has also created its first ever 5th Anniversary Shorts Collection, co-curated by the entire programming team. The programme invites audiences into the films that have shaped the curators’ relationships with the cinema, histories and cultures represented throughout the festival, offering a uniquely personal reflection on five years of Samizdat.

Beyond Glasgow, the festival will travel further across Scotland than ever before. Following its opening week at Glasgow Film Theatre and The Pyramid at Anderston, Samizdat will bring selected screenings to Cromarty, Edinburgh, Dunfermline and Aberdeen, extending its reach and bringing distinctive cinema from Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus to audiences across the country.

Natalia Guzevataya, Programme Manager and Curator, said: “Following what can already be called a Samizdat tradition, the programme opens with a collection of animations, setting the world of our deepest dreams and nightmares.

“This time, our recurring genre strand focuses on Love Stories, offering three radically different windows into romance across Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus, and finds itself in curious dialogue with a spontaneously created documentary strand, Re-membering the Archive.

“Love and memory, both working through tiny, peculiarly particular details, together carry the programme’s political and poetic structure. And, of course, we’re marking the end of an era in Eastern European cinema, the passing of Béla Tarr, with a rare 35mm screening of Werckmeister Harmonies.

“To celebrate our fifth anniversary, we tried something new and, for the first time, co-curated a screening all together – a collection of shorts that speak to what Samizdat means to each of us.”

Dylan Beck, Festival Manager and Curator, said: “Reaching this five-year milestone is a testament to the interest our audiences have shown in cinema from Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus – we cannot wait to celebrate this landmark year with a programme that pays tribute to how far we have come.

“We will be joined in person by a few filmmakers in Glasgow – the city where Samizdat started as a small project run by a group of volunteers – before hitting the road to present select screenings in more locations across Scotland than ever before.”

Sambrooke Scott, Head of Audience Development at Screen Scotland, said: “Samizdat is a festival that celebrates and embodies the pioneering and distinctive filmmaking of Eastern Europe and the festival’s growing reputation and reach is testament to their exciting, diverse and eclectic programme which means, on any given day, you can experience animated shorts from the 1970s, contemporary features from the diaspora, and 35mm prints of classic auteurs from Eastern Europe.

“The festival is unique within Scotland and the UK, and its increasing geographic reach underlines the continued interest and appetite for and from the communities reflected within the programme. Screen Scotland is supporting this edition through our Film Festivals and Screening Programme Development Funding, ensuring that the festival continues its mission to explore new work, expand its reach and break new ground.”

Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival takes place in:

Glasgow: 6–11 October 2026 at Glasgow Film Theatre and The Pyramid at Anderston
Cromarty: 13–16 October 2026 at Cromarty Cinema
Edinburgh: 22–25 October 2026 at Filmhouse
Dunfermline: 30 October 2026 at Peacock Cinema, Carnegie Hall
Aberdeen: 7 November 2026 at Belmont Cinema, Aberdeen Art Gallery

Samizdat strives to ensure its programme can be enjoyed by as many people as possible. All festival venues are wheelchair accessible, films are presented with English subtitles, and selected screenings include descriptive subtitles. Detailed accessibility information and the Audience Access Fund are available via the festival website.

As part of its commitment to accessibility, most Samizdat screenings operate on a pay-what-you-can model, with ticket prices beginning at £4. The festival also offers an Audience Access Fund to support attendees facing financial barriers, helping to cover costs such as travel and childcare where needed.

The 2026 edition of Samizdat is supported by Screen Scotland’s Film Festival and Screening Programme Fund and Film Hub Scotland, part of the BFI’s Film Audience Network, and funded by Screen Scotland and National Lottery funding from the BFI.

This Week: Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival

Exclusive and premiere screenings of visionary and unearthed masterpieces
Showcasing radical and incendiary works of cinema including The Hourglass Sanatorium, The Cremator, Intercepted, and The Devil’s Bride
Festival focuses on female filmmakers, unearthed surrealist and horror cinema, animation and short film gems

Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival 2024 programme features unearthed masterpieces, contemporary features and documentaries, uncategorizable animated oddities and short film gems.

Running from 1 – 5 October, the Festival showcases radical works of cinema at its partner venues Glasgow Film Theatre, CCA Glasgow and Summerhall Edinburgh. Several screenings will also be available to view through the Festival’s online partner Klassiki.

The Festival kicks off on 1 October at the Glasgow Film Theatre with a new instalment of bizarre, eerie, and unique Animations of the late Eastern Bloc (1980-1997).

A surgery is performed on a bust of Joseph Stalin, a yeti living in the mountains of Kazakhstan listens to The B-52s, a school of vengeful fish attacks a seaside village, and a man pawns his face to buy a lottery ticket.

This collection is of some of the most dreamlike and thought-provoking shorts from a time and place where the animated image served as a stage for unprecedented artistic and political expression.

The animation screening will be followed by a free-entry Opening Night celebration at the CCA Glasgow’s Third Eye Bar, featuring Samizdat-themed cocktails and a DJ set by Kernius Linkevicius.

Also at the Glasgow Film Theatre on 4 October, as part of Night Terrors: A Samizdat Special Horror Event, there is a special screening of The Hourglass Sanatorium (Sanatorium pod klepsydrą) (1973) with a recorded introduction by Prof. Ewa Mazierska.

This sublimely surreal Alice-in-Wonderland tale by renowned Polish director Wojciech Jerzy Has follows a young Jewish man named Joseph who visits his father in a sanatorium, only to find the place strangely abandoned. As he explores further through its labyrinthine rooms, he starts to lose all grip on time and reality.

As a follow-up to the main Festival, on 19 October, Samizdat will host a pop-up screening of Grigori Kromanov’s hypnotising sci-fi noir Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (Hukkunud Alpinisti hotell) (1979), alongside a rerun of its programme of animations and shorts, at the Edinburgh Summerhall.

In the film, a police inspector arrives at a remote hotel in response to a call out: except there is nothing to investigate, yet. As he meets its strange guests, the hotel is cut off from civilization by an avalanche – and bizarre events start to unfold. The film screens with selected shorts and animations from across the Festival.

Also screening at the Festival between 1-5 October are:

Set in 1930s Prague, Juraj Herz’s masterwork of Czechoslovak New Wave, The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol) (1969) follows Karel Kopfrkingl, a seemingly mild-mannered crematorium worker who becomes increasingly obsessed with the notion of death as a means of purification. As Nazist beliefs begin to infiltrate his worldview, Kopfrkingl’s twisted sense of morality spirals into madness, leading him to see his work as a divine mission to ‘save’ humanity by sending souls to the afterlife.

Screening for the first time with original English subtitles, The Touch (Прикосновение) (1989) takes place in the Kazakh steppe of the long-gone past as a nomadic blind girl with prophetic abilities crosses paths with a fugitive slave. Shot in mixed colour/black-and-white cinematography, this mythical story of tragic love is a hidden gem of the Kazakh New Wave.

A hidden gem of found-footage horror, Adrian Țofei’s directorial debut Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015) centres around an aspiring Romanian filmmaker (Țofei) whose obsession with Anne Hathaway manifests itself as a twisted desire to convince her to move to Romania and star in his projects. As he documents his endeavour, his obsession escalates, leading to terrifying and violent consequences for those caught in his orbit.

Banned by the Soviet authorities, the first Caucasus feature directed by pioneer woman-filmmaker Nutsa Gogoberidze (mother of Lana Gogoberidze, whose film Some Interviews was screened at Samizdat 2023) documents a mystical world on the verge of extinction.

Cheerless (Uzhmuri) (1934) was commissioned to celebrate the Communists’ drive to drain the Mingrelian swamps inhabited by the treacherous spirits ‘Uzhmuri’, according to local beliefs. The magical realist style of the film and its equivocal storytelling undermine this message.

In A Picture to Remember (Фото на пам’ять) (2023), part of Samizdat’s annual Ukrainian film programme, the war is narrated through the voices of three generations of women: A grandmother in occupied Donbass, a mother studying parasites one floor above a morgue in Kyiv, and a daughter trying to make sense of reality through a camera lens. The film is prefaced by an experimental Ukrainian short film In The Noise Of A Downpour.

A Lithuanian musical rich with traditional folklore imagery and explosive visual style, The Devil’s Bride (Velnio Nuotaka) (1974) sees imp Pinčiukas expelled from heaven and landing in a lake by a windmill. He meets the miller, Baltaragis and makes a pact, but when the little devil tries to claim what was promised, Baltaragis attempts to trick him, and chaos ensues.

Tonya Noyabrova’s coming-of-age drama Do You Love Me? (Ти мене любиш?)(2023) shows a meticulously recreated Ukraine of the 1990s through the eyes of Kira, a teenager whose most tender years are spent amongst the artistic intelligentsia against the background of a collapsing Soviet empire.

Oksana Karpovych’s searing documentary Intercepted (Мирнi Люди) (2024) is a profound exploration of the very nature of war. The film is composed of long shots of landscapes and interiors devastated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, overlaid with a voiceover of telephone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families that were intercepted in 2022 by the Ukrainian Secret Service.

As part of a curatorial partnership with the Borscht Film Club (part of the Beetroots Collective), Samizdat will also host a screening of The Balcony Movie (Film Balkonowy) (2021), a unique Polish documentary comprised of director Paweł Łoziński’s conversations with random pedestrians passing by his Warsaw flat’s balcony.

Funny, pensive, touching, or troublesome, these momentary encounters paint a vivid and strange portrait of contemporary society, with all its hopes and issues. Director Paweł Łoziński will participate in an online Q&A with the audience after the screening.

With last festival’s Short Film Audience Award going to Comrade Policeman by Kazakh director Assel Aushakimova, the festival is continuing and expanding its Short Film Competition. This year, 17 titles — from Estonia to Kyrgyzstan — will compete for the main prize, awarded based on audience voting.

Real and unreal, presence and absence, human and inhuman blur together in Dusan Milić’s tense anti-war thriller-horror Darkling (Мрак). In rural Kosovo of the 1990s, eleven-year-old Milica lives in a dilapidated farmstead within the Serbian enclave with her mother Vuckiva and despotic grandfather Milutin.

Every night after dark, an unseen force seems to terrorise the family and slaughter their livestock, but the increasingly paranoid and dangerously erratic Milutin obstinately refuses to leave what’s left of his home.

In Lighthouse (Маяк) (2006), a young woman returns to her childhood village from Moscow in the hopes of persuading her grandparents to leave the war-town Caucasus. However, any escape proves elusive. The first feature filmed in Armenia to be directed by an Armenian woman, Lighthouse is a languorous rumination on local connections, memory and loss.

Samizdat Film Festival Horror Strand Curator and Festival Director Harriet Idle has said: “I think that this year’s programme is truly special and offers something for everyone — whether you’re a devout horror fan, have a love for animation, or want to discover some of the artistic richness produced from this part of the world.

“It’s such a joy for us to showcase some really absorbing, visually stunning films that don’t always receive the visibility they deserve in Scotland.”

Dylan Beck, Samizdat’s new Guest Curator, says: “I’ve previously enjoyed the festival as an audience member, and it’s been a pleasure to join Samizdat as a guest curator for its third iteration!

“I’m excited to be introducing a couple of Baltic cinema classics and look forward to watching other curators’ picks. It’s great to see the interest in films from the region growing — and with it the event, too!’

Festival Manager Ilia Ryzhenko adds: “Now that the festival has entered its third year, we are less restricted by the need to prove that there is a real demand for cinema from the ‘Wider Eastern Europe’, including other post-socialist spaces.

“This allows us to really play to our strengths, experimenting with different formats, events, genres, and bringing our screenings to venues outside of Glasgow and Edinburgh.”

Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival takes place at Glasgow Film Theatre and CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow.

Several virtual screenings of films from the in-person programme and recorded events are accessible on the website of Samizdat’s partner Klassiki, the world’s only curated streaming platform for films from Eastern/Central Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. All virtual screenings and events are accessible to attendees who join Klassiki’s membership.

Samizdat strives to ensure that its line-up can be seen by as many people as possible, so most film screenings are priced on a sliding scale, where the attendees are invited to pay based on their preference and ability. Special events are sometimes priced differently.

The 2024 edition of Samizdat is supported by Screen Scotland’s National Lottery Film Festival and Screening Fund and Film Hub Scotland, part of the BFI’s Film Audience Network, awarding funds from Screen Scotland and National Lottery funding from the BFI. Samizdat’s event co-organised with the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain is jointly funded by Awards for All Scotland.

Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival runs from 1 to 5 October and 19 October 2024.