Staged in conjunction with the Romanian Cultural Centre, the Other Cinema's Lucian Pintilie retrospective (8th-13th October) gathers all 10 of his features into a single UK season for the first time. Pintilie's work is very much rooted in the nation's traumatic experiences during the 20th century. Set in the 1920s, Unforgettable Summer (1994) opens with a wave of nostalgic optimism that is all-too-quickly overrun by the ethnic tensions that continue to blight the Balkans. His flashbacking first feature, Sunday At Six (1965), focused on the Second World War and chronicles a couple's desperate bid to sustain their romance in the midst of inhuman suffering.

This helplessness in the face of the totalitarian tide of history recurs in the lacerating trilogy on the impact of Communism on every aspect of Romanian life, The Reenactment (1968), The Oak (1992) and Too Late (1996). But, as the politicised love story Last Stop Paradise (1998) and the darkly comedic duo of Afternoon Of A Torturer (2001) and Niki & Flo (2003) suggest, things have only marginally improved since the advent of democracy.

The Closer Croatia selection at the Riverside Studios (7th-10th October) also opens in more innocent times, with Ante Babaja's The Birch Tree (1967) blending rural lyricism with sly wit and affecting drama. However, a very different picture of the pre-Communist countryside is presented in Krsto Papic's Handcuffs (1969), as a wedding is disturbed by executioners hunting Stalinist dissidents. This ruthless aspect of the national character is further explored in the fact-based drama The Pine Tree in the Mountain (1971), which broke with the proscribed socialist realist formula for the discussion of wartime subjects. Yet Antun Vrdoljak's approach still stands in striking contrast to Lukas Nola's more empathetic and poetic assessment of the civil conflict of the 1990s in Celestial Body (2001).

While the emphasis is clearly on Croatia's fraught past, the mood does lighten for Zvonimir Berkovic's chess-inspired romantic triangle, Rondo (1966), Kreso Golik's charming 1930s musical comedy He Who Sings Means No Harm (1970), Zoran Tadic's mischievously illicit teleplay The Crime Rhythm (1988), Snjezana Tribuson's quirky romcom Three Men Of Melita Zganjer (1998) and Dalibor Matanic's lesbian dramedy, Fine Dead Girls (2002). Moreover, there are also two programmes marking the achievement of the famous Zagreb School of Animation.

Jan Jakub Kolski is one of Poland's most distinctive directors, and the Polish Cultural Institute's season at the Riverside Studios (23rd-24th October) is the UK's first comprehensive tribute. Kolski's debut, Burial Of A Potato (1990), is a typically eclectic mix of fable and hard-hitting comment, as the village to which Franciszek Pieczka returns after being released from a Nazi camp may be populated with seemingly harmless eccentrics, but they still exhibit a poisonous (and wholly misplaced) anti-Semitism. Adam Kamien's priest receives an equally hostile reception in Miraculous Place (1994) from superstitious peasants who expect him to wondrous works similar to those wrought by Franciszek Pieczka, who is corrupted by his new-found powers in Johnnie Waterman (1993).

Yet despite its social insight, what most shines through Kolski's films is the sense of fantasy that enables a violinist to play beautiful music by studying pieces of broken crockery in The Man Who Read Music from Plates (1995) and the blacksmith in The Story Of The Cinema From The Village Of Popielawy (1998) to invent a movie projector (many years before the Lumières) that animates drawings on the bladders of fish and pigs. Another smith is key to Pograbek (1992), as childless horse slaughterer Mariusz Saniternik resists Tadeusz Szymków's offer to impregnate his devoted wife, Grazyna Blecka-Kolska.