Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival Director Dylan Beck (Film Interview)

With a punchy name inspired by secretly written, copied, and circulated literature in the former Soviet Union, Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival is coming back to Scotland this autumn to bring us a rich variety of stories, filmmakers, and conversations, dedicated exclusively to cinema from Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus. Festival manager Dylan Beck tells us about the festival itself, its mission, and representation of the region in film.

What was the inspiration behind Samizdat? 

It was started by a small group of people, very much in a grassroots way. Initially, it was more like a film club or one-off screenings, but it grew arms and legs.

From the start, I’d say the team has been roughly half and half: people from the region itself, living in diaspora, with personal experiences of migration, and people who are from here but have a strong interest in the region’s cinema, often grounded in film studies or an academic/thematic interest. So, it’s been a real mix of diasporic voices and people from here who have come to the festival from different angles and perspectives.

What is your main hope or mission behind this year’s Samizdat? 

It’s exciting to bring Eastern European, Caucasian, and Central Asian cinema to screens outside the big cities. 

I hope we can reach people who don’t have much knowledge of the region and that something in the programme piques their interest. We have such an exciting programme; it’s great to be presenting it to audiences across more of Scotland, even if not everywhere.

We have quite a few filmmakers joining us in person this year. There’s something special about in-person connections at a film festival. You can talk directly to the people behind the film, ask questions, and turn a screening into a real dialogue.

That’s what excites me about film festivals in general. Bringing audiences together, creating space for conversation, excitement, critique – everything. It doesn’t have to be just ‘I loved this film’; if someone passionately hates it, I want to hear about that too.

You’re clearly expanding this year. Do you feel there is growing interest in the festival and in the region it represents? 

From our side, there’s a real interest in reaching diaspora communities who don’t just live in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and presenting these films to local audiences wherever they are.

I remember reading that Eastern European migrants in Scotland don’t only move to big cities; they’re spread all over. So, we can’t reach our own communities just by staying in the central belt. Our success in Aberdeen has reminded us how important it is not to limit ourselves geographically. There is interest in ‘different cinema’ everywhere; community cinemas and film clubs are doing beautiful work all over the country.

What do you think about current representation of that region in film and media? And does that also motivate the work you’re doing?

Historically, by which I mean even just pre-Brexit, there was extreme demonisation of migrants from places like Romania or Poland. That came with very flat stereotypes in media.

In more recent years, I feel like there’s less of that in a very particular way. Not because the situation has improved fundamentally, but because as UK politics shifts to the right, you see the same people who previously complained about ‘terrible Polish people coming here’ now idealising Polish immigrants as the ‘good’ kind of immigrant – white, Christian – while directing hostility more squarely at black or brown migrants. So Eastern Europeans get repositioned in the public imagination, but it’s still within a racist, hierarchical framework.

From a representation perspective, a lot of the time our stories are just not there. When they are, they’re often superficial or stereotypical. But for me, the question isn’t only ‘how are we represented?’

It’s also: given our experience of being demonised as migrants, how do we stand alongside those who are now bearing the brunt of hostility? How do we share understanding and build real solidarity across migrant communities, rather than only centring our own experience? We’ve tried to reflect that in our programming. 

What are you most excited about in this year’s festival programme?

Dylan: In terms of retrospectives, we are celebrating Béla Tarr, a powerhouse of Hungarian and Eastern European cinema at large. This is the first time that we’re going to be screening in film and not digital which has been a learning curve.

I’m also both excited and hopeful that people are open to discovering documentaries this year.

Samizdat opened on 6th October with screenings in Glasgow, after which it will move to Cromarty and Edinburgh, finishing its run in Aberdeen on 7th November.

Read the full Samizdat festival programme