Samizdat 2025

For the return of Samizdat’s special genre strand, 2025 is the year of the teen. Curators Hattie Idle and Joe McFarlane bring together a collection of four films that traverse the landscape of cinematic adolescence. 

Teen Film is unlike a lot of other genres. It is defined by its subject matter, certainly, in that it concerns teenage lives and teenage characters. But teen films are often wildly disparate in terms of narrative, tone, and aesthetic, which makes the genre itself rather difficult to fully grasp. Yet, more often than not, we know a teen film when we see it. While the closely related genre of the ‘coming-of-age’ film often tracks similar journeys of growth and discovery in its protagonists’ young lives, the teen film is differentiated by its very particular intensity. The young adults of the coming-of-age film struggle with living as kids in an adult world; the teen film constructs a world entirely separate. 

What strikes at the heart of teen films, for us, is that they capture the all-encompassing, world-ending feeling of adolescence. It is such emotive extremes that drive, for example, the hair-raising, high-octane rebellion of teen melodrama; the campy, bloody goriness of the teen slasher; or the soporific bohemias of the slacker movie. The teen film is also a genre of particular interest to us as curators of Eastern European cinema because of the very fact that it is a genre that, firstly, is so overwhelmingly associated with the United States — with John Hughes, James Dean, or The Nightmare on Elm Street. But secondly, and most importantly, it is a genre that is obsessed with the dynamics of power. So much of the thematic drive of the teen film is the very teenage pursuit of rebellion; of disrupting a world that doesn’t care for them, or wants to silence them; of breaking moulds. It is a genre for outsiders, misfits, losers, deviants. It is in this way that we felt compelled to explore the landscape of the Eastern European teen film — how the films from this region frame adolescent rebellion, inertia, freedom, or disillusionment in their own terms. 

The strand showcases four teen films that span decades and hundreds of miles in scope. These films together highlight the varied archetypes and thematic penchants of the teen film — from the lone rebel on a mission in Andrzej Wajda’s master work Ashes and Diamonds (1958), to the young virgin looking for sexual awakening in Jiří Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains (1966), a jock’s first flashes of romantic obsession with both girls and with literature in Southern Chronicles (2024), or the hapless slackers roped into transporting cargo for dangerous gangsters in Stuff and Dough (2001). Yet these films also reckon with intensities of a very different kind; they engage with the feelings of power and powerlessness in a way that emphasises how the teen film can in fact be such a unique, and forceful, political tool. The realm of slackerdom, in the hands of Romanian director Cristi Puiu, for example, is re-articulated here as a certain loss of direction, of rationality and logic, and the immense uncertainty (and absurdity) of the new capitalist system after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Ceaușescu’s regime in 1989. Stuff and Dough’s treatment of teenage boredom and stupidity through a languid style of long, uncut takes and handheld, fly-on-the-wall-style camerawork has since been perceived as the beginning of what is now called the Romanian New Wave movement — a central vein of New Wave cinema in the 2000s that still pulses through a new generation of filmmakers today, including the likes of Radu Jude (Bad Luck Banging 2021, 8 Postcards from Utopia 2024), Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days 2007), and Puiu himself (The Death of Mister Lazarescu 2005). As ever, teens are at the very frontier of change.