The 5th annual Romanian Film Festival, themed "Travelling Shots: Families Beyond Boundaries," will be held on different dates at Stanford University, UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University starting on Nov. 5th and ending on Nov. 13th. 

Stanford University will host the festival on November 5th and November 8th.

Sunday, November 8, 2015:

• 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm CHILD’S POSE by Calin Peter Netzer, drama, Romania, 2013
• 3:15 pm – 4:45 pm WAITING FOR AUGUST by Teodora Ana Mihai, documentary, Belgium, 2014
• 4:45 pm – 5:15 pm Q&A with director Teodora Ana Mihai
• 5:30 pm – 6:15 pm Panel: “TRAVELLING SHOTS: FAMILIES BEYOND BOUNDARIES”
• 6:30  pm – 8:15 pm Q.E.D. by Andrei Gruzsniczki, drama, Romania, 2013
• 8:15 pm – 8:45 pm 
Q&A with director Andrei Gruzsniczki

For the complete list of other festival dates, times, locations and films, please visit https://rofilmfestival.wordpress.com/program/

Sponsored by Stanford's Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies  (CREEES), and the Special Language Program (SLP), and the Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley (ISEEES) and the Department of Cinema at San Francisco State University. 

Co-sponsored by Stanford's The Europe Center,  Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Stanford University Libraries and UC Los Angeles' Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures, Center for European and Eurasian Studies, and the Romanian Student Club, and the “Nicolae Tonitza” High School, Bucharest, Romania, and Fundatia Semn, Romania.

This event is now full.  Please contact khaley@stanford.edu if you would like to be added to the wait list.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is not the cipher he is sometimes thought to be. His early life, his career in intelligence, and his early service in the newly democratic St. Petersburg -- explain the policies now on display at home and increasingly abroad. Putin has evolved as the country has, becoming the most consequential leader of any country in the world. Although he is often portrayed as an enigma or as caricature, it is essential to understand the characteristics, events and goals that motivate him.  

Steven Lee Myers has worked at The New York Times for twenty-six years, seven of them in Russia during the period when Putin consolidated his power. He spent two years as bureau chief in Baghdad, covering the winding down of the American war in Iraq, and now covers national security issues. He lives in Washington, D.C.

The Pussy Riot protest, and the subsequent heavy handed treatment of the protestors, grabbed the headlines, but this was not an isolated instance of art being noticeably critical of the regime. As this book, based on extensive original research, shows, there has been gradually emerging over recent decades a significant counter-culture in the art world which satirises and ridicules the regime and the values it represents, at the same time putting forward, through art, alternative values. The book traces the development of art and protest in recent decades, discusses how art of this kind engages in political and social protest, and provides many illustrations as examples of art as protest. The book concludes by discussing how important art has been in facilitating new social values and in prompting political protests.

Lena Jonson is Associate Research Fellow at UI. Her research currently focuses on Russian domestic politics and issues of political and societal change (modernisation) as well as the contemporary role of culture and its standing in Russia.

Lena Jonson has published several articles and works examining Russian society and politics (mainly foreign and security policy), Russia's relations with Europe and Russian relations with the former Soviet territories. She has also published widely on Central Asia, and on Tajikistan in particular. 

Lena Jonson is one of the founders of the network "Sällskapet för studier av Ryssland, Central-och Östeuropa samt Centralasien" (1997) and was its first chairperson. She has been a guest researcher at George Washington University and the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Centre, as well as a scholarship recipient at the universities of (then) Leningrad and Moscow. From 2005-2009, she served as Cultural Attaché at the Swedish Embassy in Moscow. In 2002, she worked as a Political Officer at the OSCE-office i Dushanbe, Tajikistan. In 1997-1998, she was a Senior Researcher at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.

Sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

As part of a major speaking tour across the United States, author and award-winning filmmaker Bernhard Rammerstorfer will present his latest book and DVD project called “Taking the Stand: We have More to Say”.  Accompanying him will be two survivors of the Holocaust, Mrs. Reneé Firestone and Mrs. Hermine Liska, providing one of the last opportunities learn about the Holocaust from those who lived through it.

“Taking the Stand: We Have More to Say” condenses insights and experiences of nine victims of the Nazi movement and their messages to the younger generation. They are from five different countries and were persecuted for reasons of ethnicity, political ideology, or religion. For five years, Rammerstorfer collected questions directed to Holocaust survivors that were posed by schoolchildren and students all over the world. The catalog of questions, unique in the world, consists of 100 questions from 61 schools and universities in 30 countries on 6 continents.

At the event, Mr. Rammerstofer will talk about his latest documentary and present some sequences from the film followed by a Q&A session with Mrs. Firestone and Mrs. Liska, who both appear in it.  Please note that there will be a translator during the Q&A session.

Everyone is welcome to stay after the event for a book signing by the author and the two survivors.

Bernhard Rammerstorfer is an Austrian author and filmmaker who is best known for his numerous books and films about the Nazi regime, including the book “Unbroken Will” and the award-winning documentary “Ladder in the Lions Den”. Besides his work as a writer and producer, he also frequently gives lectures at schools, universities and memorial sites all over Europe and the US.

Reneé Firestone was born in 1924 in Užhorod (today’s Ukraine) into a Jewish family. In spring of 1944, she was deported to the concentration camp in Auschwitz, and later that year she was  sent to the female forced labor camp in Silesia where she stayed until the liberation by the Russian Army in May 1945. After the war, Firestone lived in Prague before emigrating to the United States with her family in 1948. She worked as a fashion designer and ran a successful boutique. In 1998, she told her story in Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning documentary “The Last Days”. She regularly speaks about the Holocaust to young people in schools, at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, and at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Reneé Firestone lives in Los Angeles.

Hermine Liska was born in 1930 in Austria. As a child of Bible Students (today’s Jehovah’s Witnesses), her parents refused to raise her according to the Nazi ideology. For that reason, she was taken away from her parents in 1941 and put into a “reeducation center”. After the war, she was able to return to her home, got married and had three children. Since almost two decades she has been visiting schools all over Austria and told her story to thousands of students. In 2009, she was invited to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC to tell her story. Hermine Liska lives near Graz in Austria.

This event is co-sponsored by The Europe Center and the Stanford Austria Club