The festival program which turns Adana into the heart of cinema every year is very rich this year as well.

Finalists of National Feature Film, Mediterranean Short Film and National Student Film competitions are waiting for the results in excitement.

The Screening Section of the festival hosting award-winning feature and short films and documentaries from various parts of the world is to introduce nearly 220 films.

The festival is also distinguished with workshops, exhibitions and talks to be held for those interested in cinema as well as the first Golden Boll International Cinema Congress.

The list is ready: the competition program of 8th Jameson CineFest is complete. We can say that this year’s program, all the 14 movies, is much stronger than last year’s, moreover, it is going to be the strongest Hungarian festival competition program ever. Our aim is unchanged: to create the best international film festival in Hungary – without any compromises.

We regard the US line important: you will be able to watch the best indie oversea films in Miskolc and also find Sundance awarded movies like the special crime drama Animal Kingdom (Main Prize, 2010) directed by the Australian David Michôd, in which we can follow up how a gangster family falls apart. Martha Marcy May Marlene, a movie which appeared in Cannes and was awarded for best direction at Sundance, will be screened one month earlier than its US premiere as an unconventional suspense: the paranoiac title hero escapes from a sect were she has spent long years, however, it is no sure whether a traumatized person is welcomed in a “normal” society. Two British films are included in the section: Harry Brown with the starring of the Oscar winner Michael Caine, telling a classical revenge story; and, as no Jameson CineFest can lack sci-fi movies, Attack the Block set in London will surely be a titbit for the genre’s fans, just like Sala samobójców/Suicide Room, the first polish cyber-drama.

Karl Markovics’s first direction, Breathing/Atmen, which can be compared mostly to the works of the Dardenne brothers, will also be presented in Miskolc: this film has been awarded in Sarajevo and it turned out to be the official Austrian Oscar-nominee. Two Hungarian co-productions will be in the competition program: Adrian Sitaru’s Din dragoste cu cele mai bune intentii, which got the award for the Best Direction in Locarno; and The Other Side of Sleep, a drama by the Irish director Rebecca Daly. Even though Fleurs du mal is a French production, its director, David Dusa is of Hungarian origins and so we can regard this work as a little bit of ours, either. The drama Michael is coming straight from this year’s Cannes competition: Markus Schleinzer’s (he is Michael Haneke’s casting director) very strong debuting topic, the portrait of a pedophile, it has divided the critics’ opinion.

We will screen 14 long feature films in competition and 6 out of competition. True to the traditions of the Miskolc International Film Festival, it is going to present only Hungarian premieres. The greatest hit out of competition is Gus Van Sant’s movie Restless, which was the opening film of Cannes’s Un certain regard. We are going to screen it only a few days after its US premiere, and it will be presented exclusively at Jameson CineFest.

Jos Horemans, president of SIGNIS Europe is going to head the international ecumenical jury of 8^th Jameson CineFest. ‘It is a great honour to be the president of the first international ecumenical jury in Hungary’, says Horemans, the leader of the European branche of the catholic world association for media and communication. ‘We are present at the world’s leading festivals and it is a great pleasure for us that in Hungary, at the dynamically developing Miskolc International Film Festival there will be a body of two catholic and two protestant members.’

Sean Durkin has been awarded for the best direction at Sundance for his film Martha Marcy May Marlene which is going to be screened in the competition program of the Miskolc International Film Festival in September. The Hungarian cinema-goers can watch the film, which appeared in the Un certain regard section in Cannes, much earlier than the Americans - as the film’s US premiere is going to be held only on 21^st October. Among the stars of this masterful psychological thriller are Christopher Abbot, Hugh Dancy - and Elizabeth Olsen, the talented sister of the Olsen twins, who gives Oscar-worthy performance in the film. Martha Marcy May Marlene escapes from the captivity of a sect, but her memories still keep her suffering for a long time. Sean Dunkin’s first feature film has a good chance for the Academy Awards, just like the opening film of Jameson CineFest, The Help, which has been leading the US charts for 14 days.

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Peter Muszatics