NATIONAL COMPETITION

Documentary cinema is currently facing yet another crisis. The credit of trust once extended to it is now being called in, though it remains unclear how. Generated images, boundless video archives on social media, and every kind of recording endlessly expand the boundaries of what may count as “documentary.” We saw as much in the submissions.

We have therefore tried to select films for the programme whose directors attempt to establish new terms between the documentary image and the author’s creative endeavour; who keep an honest relation to the many kinds of media; who renew, or at least refine, the object of non-fiction art. Until new rules emerge, this search may arise from the most unexpected challenges. In Masha Godovannaya’s Hair Curlers on a Bald Man a portrait of the famous actor Georgy Millyar is reconstructed from belongings that happened to have been preserved in an old suitcase, and from the filmmaker’s wish to try on someone else’s sense of self. In Hideaway Nikita Kartsev pieces together a picture of the present from his observations of the outer world and his inner, deeply personal experiences. While Kartsev reflects on his fatherhood, Anna Shveigolts, in the short animated documentary Maternal Dreams, speaks of mothers’ fears. Elina Khakimova makes herself and her loved ones the object of self-observation in Women’s Circle; Elizaveta Bobyleva tries to look at large problems from inside a family (Mother); Stasya Khomeriki-Granovskaya spends time with Aleksey Balabanov’s mother and, through a family lens, adds to and corrects the discourse surrounding “the principal Russian director of the 21st century” (Stay with Me a Little Longer).

Aleksei Sukhovei in Kidnappers, Ivan Boiko in The Wind Blows Wherever It Wants, and Evgenia Arbugaeva in Chuuraa turn to the nature around us and find peculiar traces of alteration in things that once seemed primeval, fixed in a deep archaic state.

The old observational documentary is in turbulence too. The filmmakers seek less to preserve the former objective, detached angle than to show how precarious any conclusion is, and to capture the essence of humanity in the broken line of constant change. Such are the stories of a museum director in Cherdyn (Olga Averkieva’s A Point for Quitting), of an artist from Siberia (Anna Sokolkova’s If I’m Not a Realist), of a woodsman in the Irkutsk taiga (Artyom Tumakov’s The Logger), and of children at a Black Sea summer camp (Alisa Tamarova’s Before the Sun).

Documentary animation is in particular demand today precisely because it can replace a reproduction of reality with a subjective portrayal of it, in which the essential points can be singled out, pushed to the grotesque, or, conversely, blended together. Two short animations, Anastasia Prasolova’s Me Too (Make Films) and Anna Donskova’s Chicks, play with the authors’ impressions, suspending them amidst a variety of techniques and styles.

How does one capture what lies beyond the visible? How does one make the invisible and the incomprehensible — which nevertheless exists — tangible? The problem also preoccupies Aleksey Fedorchenko, who in The Adventures of Mosaics on Ground and Under constructs a deceptively straightforward narrative: the story of several commissions carried out by successive generations of the Frolov family, artists working in a rare mosaic technique. Gradually it becomes clear that the heart of the film is not the dynasty of craftsmen, nor the fate of the monuments, but the capricious and mysterious power of time, which is precisely the main theme of Fedorchenko’s entire body of work.

Both Artem Danilov (Outpost) and Maria Bondarenko (It’s Time to Come Home) explore the enigmas of perception. In these stylistically very different films, their young authors examine the changes in a familiar urban landscape under present conditions. Implicit pressures leave their mark; cinema makes them visible and forces a reflection on what is happening.

Masha Chernaya’s Make Films documents the shooting of Roman Mikhailov’s While the Sky Is Watching — Mikhailov being an enigmatic, even cult figure, whose creed has been spontaneity and collective meditation. Yet Chernaya’s camera becomes an observer, altering the behaviour of everyone involved in the process.

In fact, the relation of camera to person, of director to “subject,” and, more broadly, the matter of responsibility: that is what holds this year’s selection together, extending beyond the realm of cinematic art. Ethics and poetics are now inseparable.

Alena Solntseva, Pavel Pugachev