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The White Sun of the Desert

Göteborg International Film Festival, January 28 to February 7, will highlight an exciting and less-known part of western film history: Red Western!

The concept of Soviet cowboys and East German Indians has a strange ring to it, but the fact is that the former Eastern Bloc produced lots of western films from the 1920s until the early 1980s.

"Red Westerns" were often shot in places like Yugoslavia, Mongolia and southern Soviet Union and became pawns in the Cold War propaganda game. Quite often the roles were reversed compared to their American models: good Indians and bad cowboys. Western themes and aesthetics were also used to depict Soviet history and the struggle between the Bolsheviks and anti-Bolsheviks.

Göteborg International Film Festival will show ten of the westerns produced in the Eastern Bloc, including 13 from 1936, which was made on the orders of Josef Stalin, who became so fond of John Ford's classic Lost Patrol that he demanded a Soviet version. Two other films are the Romanian The Actress, the Dollars and the Transylvanians about the hardships of Romanian and Hungarian settlers in the Wild West and Lemonade Joe, a Czech western satire and cult classic from 1964 about the Kolaloka-drinking gunfighter Joe who takes on an entire town of whiskey drunk cowboys.

Red Westerns at GIFF 2011:
13 (USSR, 1936)
The Elusive Avengers (USSR, 1967)
The White Sun of the Desert (USSR, 1969)
Seventh Bullet (USSR, 1972)
At Home Among Strangers (USSR, 1974)
The Actress, the Dollars and the Transylvanians (Romania, 1981)

Red Westerns screened in cooperation with Cinemateket during February and March:
The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (USSR, 1924)
Lemonade Joe (Czechoslovakia, 1964)
No One Wanted to Die (USSR, 1966)
The Eighth (Bulgaria, 1968)

Welcome to Göteborg International Film Festival January 28 to February 7, 2011!