Stills from Bal/Honey and Spirit of the Beehive

Bhubaneswar, Sept. 25: Festivity is in the air and the film society’s monthly screening, which will be held on Durga Puja eve, has classics in store for kids.

On the evening of September 29, the Film Society of Bhubaneswar (FSB) will screen two international films at Jayadev Bhavan auditorium.

Winner of the Golden Bear for the best film at the Berlin international film festival in 2010, Bal/Honey, 2010, is the final film of Turkish writer-director Semih Kaplanoglu’s celebrated Yusuf Trilogy. The trilogy explores the middle age, adolescence and the childhood, in that order, of Yusuf, the central character. The prequels of the trilogy have been shown in previous screenings. “Though the films are part of a trilogy, they can also be seen as stand alone films,” said Jagat Basa, a member of FSB.

The film depicts the life of a family in rural Anatolia. Yusuf is an introvert schoolboy who can only express himself to his father Yakup. Yusuf’s father, however, earns a living by collecting honey from the woods, while his mother Zehra runs the family.

Issues build up when the honey harvest fails. One evening, Yakup does not return from the forest. Unwilling to accept his father’s disappearance, Yusuf flees his house on a spiritual journey into the depths of the forest.

The second screening of the evening will be shown as part of FSB’s “classics revisited” segment. Long considered a seminal work of European cinema, Spirit of the Beehive, 1973, is the debut film of Spanish director Victor Erice.

In a Spanish village of 1940, before the devastating civil war of Spain, six-year-old Ana attends a travelling movie show of Frankenstein and becomes possessed by the memory of it. The film offers one of the most bewitching portraits of a child’s mysterious and haunted psyche ever created in cinema, as well as a critique of the disastrous legacy of the civil war.