Briefly about the selected screenings of the 5th day of Message to Man festival.
International Competition Program of September 19 includes Animation Program and 4 documentary films.
“A touching film by Zosya Rodkevich about kindness, patience and humanity. It is hard to find such heroes. In this family, even the children understand that they need to fight for the boy, and by the end you start to believe that they can make him normal. They believe that love always wins, and surely this time it will win as well,” Mikhail Zheleznikov, Chairman of the Selection Committee on White Mama.
“The animation program turned out to be omnigenous. There is an experimental film in 3D, a Mary Shelley–esque horror film and even a nearly abstract movie. And that is great,” Mikhail Zheleznikov on Animation Program.
National Competition Program features 4 new documentary films shown in 2 screenings. This is the last day of competition premieres, but the same shows will run the next day at Lenfilm.
“The Wolf and the Seven Kids is very peculiar picture by Elena Gutkina and Genrikh Ignatov, students of Arthur Aristakisyan at the Moscow School of New Cinema. This is a film about a father and son living in some village. It is very dark, very heavy, at some point it is almost unbearable to watch, as if there’s no getting away from the monotony of their life,” Eugeniia Marchenko, Curator of National Competition.
Panorama.doc Program continues with The Eyes of Orson Welles by Mark Cousins, who will be present during this screening.
“Cousins used to be a film critic, but he wanted something different. He shot several successful films as a documentarian. The ghost of Welles became his Virgil and helped Cousins to re-manifest himself in directing,” Alexei Medvedev, Curator of the Program.
Superreal Cinema Special Program premieres Happy as Lazzaro by Alice Rohrwacher. Another feature hit that will be shown on 19 September — Crystal Swan by Darya Zhuk about Belarus in the 90s. The special screening of the film will be introduced by Darya Zhuk and Helga Landauer.
Resistance: 1968-2018 Program features Jean-Luc Godard’s Just Great (Tout Va Bien).
“The film concludes the radical period of joint creations by Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin as part of Dziga Vertov group. On the one hand, this film that sums up their search for not shooting political films but shooting films politically”. On the other, it stars Yves Montand and Jane Fonda, who was a member of the anti-war and feminist movement. This film was Godard’s most famous one since La Chinoise. At the same time, he radically raises the question of the mechanisms of self-organization of workers and their opposition to bourgeois power structures, and the reasons for their failure,” Aleksei Artamonov, Co-curator of the Program.
Jem Cohen: A Retrospective will feature World Without End, a movie of a journey, shot in English countryside. Like the rest of the films of the Retrospective, the screening will be introduced by the director himself. On the same day, ‘Permanent Ghost’, an exhibition of photographs and videos by Cohen opens in K-Gallery.
An anthology of Aleksandr Rastoguev’s unfinished films will be shown in Poryadok Slov bookstore. Aleksandr died in Central Africa in July. The show is titled ‘SMS from the CAR: “The world is wonderful in its idiotic diversity”’. This was one of the last text messages sent by Aleksandr Rastoguev from the filming site.
Marking 100 years of the St. Petersburg State Institute of Film and Television Program also continues. September 19 a workshop by Dmitry Venkov, director and media artist, author of one of the films for In Silico competition. Vladimir Nepevny, director, will present his documentary about Vyacheslav Gayvoronsky, a composer, called Gayvoronsky: Visions Fugitives.
You can find the complete schedule on our website.
