Futurum is a special programme presenting eight Russian films whose creators have ventured far from the canons of classical documentary cinema, without explicitly setting out to make so-called “experimental films.” The title Futurum symbolizes the hope for the continuation of this trend in the future of auteur cinema, free from industrial, commercial and academic conventions.
Misha Ketov (Smirnov Fedot) and Sasha Kozma (plemya) offer different interpretations of the eternal theme of the “little man.” Misha approaches life’s inevitable milestones with irony, transforming them into a short and bittersweet comic strip, while Sasha returns the “little man” to his prehistoric origins, resembling a character from an ancient comic strip — a petroglyph. Veronika Peat (Again in Copenhagen), Ksenia Burdinova (Leningrad) and Irina Kofova (the space between) each explore human traces, memory, and the remembrance of individuals in distinct ways. In Veronika’s film, an old photograph triggers recollection. Ksenia searches for heroes captured in random frames, set within a cinematic time that exists beyond past and present — where nothing can really pass or be considered “the present.” Meanwhile, Irina documents traces of human destinies just before those traces vanish. Elizaveta Zharikova (Where the Lights Don’t Shine) invites viewers for a walk into the realm of the dead, eternally striving to touch the living. Lola Palmer (Journey to a Wonderful World) then lifts us from the underground back into the sky, into an idealized, abstract world of color and form. Perhaps the most experimental film in the programme, Valeria Podbeltseva’s Intention delves into the patterns of relations between the sexes — a necessary but insufficient condition for humanity’s continued existence with all the by-products of human activity, of which the most important is still cinema.
Mikhail Zheleznikov