Synopsis: This film is about gazes and goodbyes. An attempt to weave images with words and to weave a poem with images. I realize that living is suffering to see that Nemu, the one of my daughters, squirms with the struggle and sunflowers squirm to try to bloom. * Festival selection: Oberhauzen, Encounters (Bristol) and others.
Using precise and illustrative cinematic images, Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan make verité stories that counter the mythic concepts of America. Their short films have premiered at Cannes, Berlin, Sundance, TIFF and Locarno. Their first feature film “Pahokee” premiered in competition at Sundance and was released in the United States and France. Their second feature “Naked Gardens” premiered in competition at Tribeca and in the EU at IDFA.
Synopsis: Zélie, 9, admires her big brother Basile who accumulates images like a collector. In the absence of their mother, he involves her in the shooting of his film. But Zélie has to deal with her director's changing moods. About the director: Camille Dumortier. Director, screenwriter. She studied cinema on her own. In 2019, she made her first short film, “Les pieds sur terre”. Currently working on the short feature film "Assis, pas bouger!" and a full-length debut.
Synopsis: My father used a camera just once in his lifetime. After 30 years he asked me to digitise the VHS material he filmed. I was wondering what he remembers. Created from an impulse to rethink and rewatch personal archive footage, the film explores memory and its relation to documentation and non-institutional archive practices. Connecting politics with intimate spaces, the film questions both the influence of war on private archives and the role of gardens as places of new beginnings. About the director: Karla Crnčević. Dramaturge and film worker. She explores politics of images and sound through various formats and…
Synopsis: Please note that the film you are about to see is taken from real material of film history, namely the disclaimers and warnings that frame the existence of many films. However, any collusion between art and industry, any conflict of interest between freedom of creation and the law, or any hint of moralism on the life of images, would be purely incidental and unintentional. About the director: Maxime Martinot. French director, editor and writer. After his cinema studies in Paris 8, he works between Brittany, Paris and Lisbon. His first feature film “Trois contes de Borges” won two prizes…
Alexander Markov is a director of documentary films and a film historian. Born in 1973 in Leningrad, he graduated from the St. Petersburg University of Culture and Arts in 2000 as a film and video studio director. In 2003, he translated Wim Wenders book The Logic of Images from German for the publishing house B&K in St. Petersburg. From 2000–2004, he studied at the Russian Institute of Art History and graduated as a historian of cinema. From 2005–2006, he studied at the Konrad Wolf Academy for Film and Television in Potsdam, Germany and participated in the OpenWorld program. From 2016–2017,…
“When you read a text, you’re on your own time. That is not the case in film. In fact, in film, you’re dominated by my time. But time is different for everyone. Five minutes isn’t the same thing for you as it is for me. And five minutes sometimes seems long, sometimes seems short. Take a specific film, say, From the East: I imagine the way each viewer experiences time is different. And on my end, when I edit, the timing isn’t done just any way. I draw it out to the point where we have to cut.” “I find…
Wednesday is the day of final premières of international and national documentary competition and the first day of the animation competition screenings. And now - to details. IC 9, the final group of international competition films. Estoy Feliz by Nastia Korkia is the only Russian work in the programme. It is a very personal film about her mother who got cancer and went to the shamans of the Amazon forests to heal. As the director says, “The biggest revelation for me was, how much a person can simultaneously be unable to come to terms with the reality and strong…
The audience will see 7 Russian premières in Panorama.DOC programme, 8 films in Superreal Cinema programme, a retrospective of Federico Fellini’s films and the Russian première of a documentary about the life of the great classic. XXX IFF Message to Man that will take place on November 3–8 in St. Petersburg, announced its main out-of-competition programmes. First of all, these are the two programmes that have already become a traditional part of the Festival: Panorama.doc (curators Alexey Medvedev and Natalia Pylaeva) that presents the most prominent documentary films of the season from recognized masters and innovators, and Superreal Cinema (curator Andrei Plakhov) that…
Text prepared by a film critic Nikita Smirnov for Gorod812, a magazine about St Petersburg. Collapse of Socialism: A Dedication to the 30th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall is a final part of the 2017–2019 programme trilogy about socialism in the 20th century. In 2017, the programme’s first part was presented (curated by Aleksei Artamonov and Mikhail Trofimenkov), Revolution: A Spectre is Haunting the Screen, about the methods of depicting the revolutionary events on-screen employed throughout the cinema’s history; in 2018, Resistance. 1968–2018 (curated by Aleksei Artamonov and Katerina Beloglazova), about the legacy of 1968. Aleksei Artamonov and…