Thirty-five years is no small matter. In Joseph and His Brothers, Thomas Mann wrote of a deep well of time separating him from his characters. The past thirty-five years form a shallower well—a much closer era, yet one that shows how swiftly time flows and how it transforms the very strata from which, for instance, cinema is formed.

In this anniversary year, the programmers of the Message to Man have sought to bring back to the screen the gold mined by our colleagues over three and a half decades. We leaned over that well of time and drew forth its most precious treasures—those that have not lost their brilliance.

Our guiding principle was simple: we focused on a single layer—films that won the Festival’s Grand Prix. We sifted through nearly all we could unearth, refined our selection, and assembled ten of the finest into one programme: Ten: Grand Prix Through the Decades.

Here, you will find the “untouchable reserve” of Russian documentary filmmaking: Victor Kossakovsky’s The Belovs and Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Bread Day; masterpieces of Russian animation in Andrey Khrzhanovskiy’s Lion with a Grey Beard and Aleksandr Petrov’s My Love; and masterful examples of diverse documentary techniques in Mercedes Stalenhoef’s Carmen Meets Borat and Bernadett Tuza-Ritter’s A Woman Captured.

Finally, you will come face to face with the very nature of time, seeing how the conditional and the absolute have traded places within it, and how the method of close observation of reality has evolved over these decades.

Mikhail Ratgauz