28/05/2010 12:49

Oscar winners at the opening and closing of Cinema City Festival

This year’s Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film of the Year, "The Secret in Their Eyes" by Argentine director Juan José Campanella will officially open Cinema City Festival on Saturday, June 5th. The film will screen at open air cinema in Katolicka porta. The Festival’s closing film is a multiple Oscar winner, “The Hurt Locker”, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, the first female director ever to receive the Best Director statue at this year's Academy Awards.

“The Secret in Their Eyes” is a combination of two love stories, thriller-noir, quiet comedy and clear political critique while giving the viewer a remarkable insight into those days when films still endeavored to be magical. Critics were unanimous in judging this complex and profound story as Campanella’s best achievement to date. Soledad Villamil and Ricardo Darín delivered outstanding performances for which they received numerous awards.

The story follows former federal agent Benjamín Esposito who, while writing a book, reminisces on one particular unsolved crime he investigated during the course of his career. Searching for a person who committed rape and murder of a beautiful, young woman proved to be extremely hard, since no evidence was found at the scene of the crime. That being so, Esposito is left to rely purely on instinct. In present day narrative we see him reopening the case which will lead him on a wandering path of finding justification for his own life and meeting a woman he was in love with.

Kathryn Bigelow’s war drama “The Hurt Locker”, winner of six Oscars at this year’s ceremony is a harrowing tale of elite bomb squad unit, volunteers working in one of the most dangerous places on Earth. This tense insight into unit’s attempts at maintaining peace and the dangers they face on daily basis within tumultuous Iraqi war zone is based on experiences of Mark Boal, a journalist and screenwriter who spent time with special unit in Iraq.