When on January 1st 2007 Bulgaria and Rumania officially entered the European Union, an explosion of joy invaded the streets of both countries. They regarded the integration into the European Community as a way of starting a journey towards development in search of the economic convergence with the rest of the continent, which is still a very distant goal.
Eleven years after they requested their incorporation, Rumania and Bulgaria became full members of the EU, thus increasing to 493 million the number of inhabitants of the countries represented in the Union. Getting through the European Commission’s difficult test was a great achievement because it carefully followed both countries’ progress in the improvement of their judicial system and the fight against corruption and organized crime. It was a great achievement since the required criteria were more severe than those required to the countries that had joined the EU previously, which grants more merit (if it is possible) to the reform effort, described by European Commission President, Durao Barroso,. as “an amazing transformation”. One year ago, Bucarest and Sofia were the center of a celebration in which the crowd poured out onto the squares and fireworks flew over both capitals to engrave in their citizens’ memory, such a historic date, and the importance of the step they were taking.
European hangover
But, every celebration has to end, and with the European hangover, Rumanians and Bulgarians started to realize that their new European voyage wouldn’t be so easy. Some community countries, Spain among them, set up a moratorium by which the citizens of both new Member States wouldn’t be allowed to be employed within their territory for the next two years, with the aim of preventing dozens of thousands of workers from arriving massively. The first disappointment was already there. The hopes of many Bulgarian and Rumanian immigrants for the legalization of their situation were postponed for two more years. However, it hasn’t been Spain, but Italy. the country which has driven the Rumanian community crazy during these first 365 days of living together. It occurred because the high criminal rate (15 out of every 100 crimes are committed by Rumanian citizens, according to the Italian police) has caused a feeling of rejection towards the Rumanians, materialized in the Romano Prodi’s Government new decree to facilitate the deportation of those who commit crimes in Italy.
Seville, one of their preferentes
The integration of Rumanians and Bulgarians is, no doubt, one of the challenges the European Union has to face, a reality that is, not only national but also ethic. We must not forget that the gipsy minority represents almost a 5% of the Bulgarian population and roughly a 10% of the Rumanian one. The marginal situation in which most of the gipsy population live (in Bulgaria, 60% of gipsies of labour age declare they are unemployed) causes them to be the most likely community to pack and regard the European adventure, as an answer to their situation. And here is where Spain plays an important role, since it is the main recipient of these countries’ immigration, with a Rumanian community which exceeds the half a million inhabitants and a Bulgarian population close to one hundred thousand people. If we investigate which cities have had the greatest increase in their population coming from both countries, we learn that Seville leads the national ranking, because its population has multiplied by six the number of Rumanian citizens ( the great majority belong to the gipsy ethnic group) who live in the Sevillian capital in just one year, passing from 1,300 to 9,000.
Towards the economic convergente?
Bulgaria and Rumania’ joint GDP represents only 1% of the total of EU , while its population exceeds a 6%, which clearly illustrates that today, they are well at the back of the Union and gives an idea of the long way they have ahead towards the economic convergence with the rest of the EU countries. If we consider their per capita income, they don’t come off well, either (it represents one third of the average community income). This situation of clear weakness within the European Union has its advantages too, because both countries will receive during the three-year- period 2007-2009 financial assistance worth 13.000 million of Euros with a view to European funds, 30% of which will be destined to the agrarian sector. The race towards convergence has started; a slow but steady growth which is bound to change the Eastern Europe landscape we see these days. That financial assistance will help many people to avoid looking for good jobs outside their country, and will put an end to their condition of “immigrant exporting” countries,
as there will be a great need of workforce to put in operation a great economic machinery. Today, Bulgarians and Romanians feel that, going hand in hand with Europe, their future will be more prosperous than it was one year ago. However, as the Bulgarian president Georgi Parvanov rightly said, “ our success as a country won’t depend on the European funds, it will depend on our work.” Álvaro Sánchez
Translated by Diana Irene Arancibia
The ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) was adopted in 1989, within the framework of Erasmus programme, and its approval in our country is set in the 
Pina Bausch, choreographer and dancer, was born in 1940 (with World War II) in Solingen (Germany). She is the director of Tanztheater Wuppertal and has just been awarded the 
The film is quite worth seeing. It’s an authentic drama, full of unfortunate characters: Karitas, a mother who takes care of her four little children: three daughters and one son without any help, and whose responsibility exceeds her; a father who looks for his son in an attempt to have a second opportunity and get out of the world of violence he’s immersed in; a mentally ill man who lives with his mother and whose only friend is Gudmund, Karitas’ son. It is a film about parents and children, no doubt, and as the name suggests, about filial relationships.
It’s a story about unhappy lives, but also of attempts to overcome unhappiness. The question it seems to pose is: is it possible to change or there comes a moment from which it is too late? Who will trust you again?
The documentary shows how, with the arrival of these new people to Mr. Vig’s life, a journey starts, which is parallel to the transformation of the castle, and it is the personal journey of realizing that he is as eaten away by loneliness and dust as the walls he wants to change now. Therefore, if he wants to open new rooms for a Monastery, he will also have to open new rooms in his life, both for the others and for himself. Mr. Vig ,in his deed, reminds us a little of Don Justo Gallego, that special character, famous in Spain for building a Cathedral in the town of Mejorada del Campo (Madrid), with rubbish. The work building, which started decades ago, is still going on, and we all could see it as an example of overcoming in an advertisement of an energetic drink.
In this film, directed by Daniele Luchetti, the political situation is the one of the Italy of the 60’s, in which the economical crisis and the recent fall of the government of Mussolini made the population to have very different views which caused a lot of confrontations. However, unlike other productions, this film shows us the daily life of the members of a family, with their personal crisis, their wishes, their passions… in short, with all ingredients necessary for the audience to identify completely with the characters. There will also be funny moments in this drama, provided almost all of them by the naïve thoughts of the young Accio and by his special way of attracting attention in a world where it seems to have arrived by chance.
played by Filipe Duarte, falls in a state of deep depression after his boyfriend’s suicide and returns to the home of his childhood for some weeks. During that time the story shows how, for our protagonist to resurrect, he will have not only to reconcile himself with his beloved’s traumatic death, but also with the death he caused to the person he had been 15 years ago, when he was heterosexual, was going to marry and had a father who accepted him. In this journey back to life he finds the help of a human being with trisomy in chromosome 21, that’s to say, with Down’s Syndrome. It’s his affectionate and pleasant nephew Vasco ( Tomas Almeida), who is 17 and whose great desire to live makes Ricardo wake up. Sometimes the “difference”, as this character demonstrates with his way of facing the world, can save us. 
The problems dragging in the couple become uncomfortable ghosts between them; Anne’s love gets stuck and turns to violence as an outlet. Georg, impassive to his wife’s abuse, makes every effort so that nothing looks like a drama.
love, destructively in love. Anna M. has the syndrome of Clerambault, what other people call ‘psychosis of the old lady’ or ‘erotic paranoia’, erotomania.
Although he began as a sports journalist, his job developed to an interest for the “problems of the common people” through the political journalism. For that reason, in 1987 he decided to interview Fidel Castro, and this interview is the one we can see opening the season Fidel tells to the Che.
The film has an easy plot, almost like a tale. It tells the story of three 30-year-old friends who spend their time sitting in a bench and have monotonous habits: drinking bear and eating cakes every days. Everything seems to be bound to be eternal until Roberto Carlos, one of them, begins to see Sunci. This is what causes a change in the lives of all them, breaking the halve-hearted balance of their lives. At that point they begin to think seriously about the future that is waiting for them in that bench.
tribute to the creative freedom, to the humour, to the irony. Domenèch Font, a cinema critic from Catalonia and professor of the University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona, referred, in the Seminary dedicated to Raúl Ruiz and parallel to the activities of the Seville Film Festival when talking about Ruiz´s cinema, to his “rizomatic condition” of curl and misplacement, that goes from branch to branch of a hard-to-identify-tree. For this reason, sometimes, one finds it incongruous and absurd, like Ionesco style or Becket style.
Set in Turkey in the year 1915, the film has a historic plot, but with a current look, as it tells a story which, unfortunately, seems forced to be repeated. The central axis of the film is the Armenian genocide at the hands of Turkish people. The parallel story, as it will happen in other films of the festival, is the love (the audience will have to choose which of both stories is the main one and which one the secondary). This is the first time in which a foreign director tells the story of this genocide and, as Taviani brothers assert, the Turkish Government pressured them for the film not to come into light. For this reason the film had to be shot in Bulgaria, a co-producer country. As Paolo Taviani said in an interview for the Spanish newspaper El País, “Turkey wants to come into the European Union. We don´t try to interfere in the matters of other states. However, we, as members of the EU, must ask them to recognize the Armenian genocide”.
Sevilla Babel