Summer Love: five tales of sun, sex, and cinema
Everyone knows that the summer months are the perfect time for romance. The hot days, the balmy nights, the licence that comes from being away on vacation. Klassiki’s new collection dedicated to summer love presents five titles that run the gamut from sweltering passion to seaside ennui, teen crushes to fairytale fantasy.
Uldis Brauns’ Motorcycle Summer (1975) transposed the biker film, with its play between cynicism and free-spiritedness, to Soviet Latvia, creating a portrait of youthful indolence produced in the middle of Brezhnevian stagnation. Vasily Pichul captured the stormy atmosphere of perestroika via the angst of teen romance in his hugely influential cult classic Little Vera (1988). Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021) conjures a warmly whimsical, magical realist fairy tale set over one long, hot summer of thwarted romance and World Cup fever. Dutch-Bosnian director Ena Sendijarević concocts a summery but unsentimental coming-of-age drama out of the fault lines between Western and Eastern Europe in her award-winning Take Me Somewhere Nice (2019). And in My Late Summer (2024), Oscar-winner Danis Tanović takes a late season trip to the picturesque islands of Croatia for a tale of middle-aged romantic longing and familial disruption.
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Motorcycle Summer
Directed by Uldis Brauns • 1975 • USSR/Latvia
When Māris receives a motorbike for his eighteenth birthday, he hits the road with his friends. When he meets unhappy bride-to-be Inese and her thoughtless fiancé, a whirlwind romance blooms that soon sees the pair riding the roads of Soviet Latvia. ...
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Little Vera
Directed by Vasili Pichul • 1988 • USSR/Russia
A scandal upon release, this hugely influential eighties cult film captures the anguished cynicism of the “last Soviet generation”. Vera (the name means “faith” in Russian, hence the pun of the title) is a teenager in a provincial port town whose da...
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What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
Directed by Alexandre Koberidze • 2021 • Georgia
Alexandre Koberidze’s existential fairy tale unfolds like a dream over a long, hot summer of thwarted romance and World Cup fever. In Georgia’s ancient capital Kutaisi, pharmacist Lisa (Oliko Barbakadze) and footballer Giorgi (Giorgi Ambroladze) f...
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Take Me Somewhere Nice
Directed by Ena Sendijarević • 2019 • Bosnia and Herzegovina/Netherlands
Dutch-Bosnian director Ena Sendijarević concocts a summery but unsentimental coming-of-age drama out of the fault lines between Western and Eastern Europe in this award-winning feature. Born and raised in the Netherlands, A...
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My Late Summer
Directed by Danis Tanović • 2024 • Croatia
Danis Tanović, the Oscar-winning director of No Man’s Land (2001), serves up a warmly melodramatic romance set to the lazy rhythms of island life. Anja Matković both writes and stars as Maja, a Zagrebian who travels to an anonymous Croatian island to cl...
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Summer Love: five tales of sun, sex, and cinema
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