Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival

Named after the practice of clandestine dissemination of censored and forbidden texts in communist states, Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival is returning for 2025 with an as-ever eclectic mix of some of the most exciting, powerful, thoughtful, weird and wonderful filmmaking from Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus. 

The festival's genre strand returns with a vengeance this year with Slackers, Misfits, Rebels: Teens on Film. This exploration of the intensities of cinematic adolescence opens on Friday 3 Oct, with a screening of Cristi Puiu’s remarkable Y2K teen road movie Stuff and Dough (Romania 2001). Other highlights of the programme include the return of its ever-popular animations event on 30 September — this year titled Ani-masters: Pioneers in Czech animation; and classic Kyrgyz western White Mountains (1964) on 1 October. 

The 2025 edition of Samizdat is supported by Screen Scotland’s Film Festival and Screening Programme Fund and Film Hub Scotland, part of the BFI’s Film Audience Network, and funded by Screen Scotland and National Lottery funding from the BFI.