IN SILICO Experimental Short Film Competition

The 16th edition of Message to Man’s experimental film competition once again offers a collection of subjective remarks on the human being, memory, consciousness, and the world. The programme seems to split roughly in half: introspective films, which look for questions and answers inside the author’s head, and extraspective ones, which take their questions and answers to the world outside. But the line between intro- and extraspection is not always clear, and the optic through which the author conveys their experience to us can scale without limit in whatever direction interests them.

The programme is divided into three screenings, in which three main themes stand out: beauty and the pain of losing it; our relations with ourselves and with others; technology and memory.

This year the experimental competition features many artists already familiar to us: Frank Heath, Anna Vasof, Mikhail Basov, Nikita Spiridonov, Anton Drozdov-Schastlivtsev, Maxim Eruzhenets and Marina Kirakosyan, Nicolaas Schmidt, Daniele Grosso, and also a classic of the film avant-garde, our frequent participant and a source of inspiration, John Smith. But most of the directors are here for the first time. Among them are four from St. Petersburg: Alena Tereshko reflecting on a provocative painting by Rubens; Roman Mikhailov staging a poetic performance in an ominous space; Dasha Iskrenko finding invisible narratives on a walk along the seashore; Ksusha Kernosenko using a witty cinematic experiment to explore the workings of childhood memory.

Once a competition programme is assembled, one always hopes to spot certain trends and tendencies in it; but the choice is subjective, and chance plays no small part. Nevertheless, when brought together, the films inevitably form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, just as is often the case with fellow passengers on long-distance trains and the audience at our screenings.

Mikhail Zheleznikov