The International Competition

The International Competition is a complex, cohesive composition. The films in the programme speak and argue in a multitude of dialects and cinematic languages, yet their conversation echoes with common conflicts and wounds. The Festival’s main competition is always a portrait of its time.

Today, the pressure of large-scale history on individual lives is coming unmistakably to the fore. In the Israeli film Shalom (the Hebrew word for “peace”), the name of an ageing rhinoceros at the Jerusalem Zoo unexpectedly takes on a particular significance. He is looked after by Rushdi, Palestinian by origin, Muslim by faith, Israeli by citizenship. As a new wave of military escalation engulfs his country, the zoo becomes an unexpected space for a conversation about peace.

Fragments of history embedded in the lives of the protagonists are pieced together by the directors of Letters from an Inner Exile and The Victors. In the former, the protagonist attempts to restore the names, dignity, and memory of the victims of Franco’s dictatorship. In The Victors, an Argentine director travels to the Falkland Islands in search of traces of the 1982 war. An exploration of the past gradually shifts towards the present — towards an unexpected friendship with someone on the other side of the conflict.

Individual traits also begin to emerge in the rhythm of the “collective body” of late socialist Yugoslavia, in Serbian artist and filmmaker Marta Popivoda’s short film Slet 1988.

The competition’s major Russian premiere is Ivan Druzhinin’s debut, Arina — a sharp yet humane look at Russia’s “now”. Here, the personal and the historical converge in the figure of Arina, an artist and nurse who embodies two seemingly incompatible worlds: love and war.

The pursuit of reality and the search for a form capable of reflecting it lead to a meditation on the nature of cinema and its power to act upon the world. What can this medium transmit, literally, from one person to another? From a father to a son, for instance? This is the question Sergio Oksman asks in A Scary Movie, made together with the director’s twelve-year-old son in an abandoned hotel whose image nods, ironically, to Kubrick’s The Shining. Ignacio Ceroi’s Don’t Tidy or Clean My Room, I Like It as It Is continues along this line: home videos belonging to a stranger, discovered by chance, set in motion an investigation that changes the filmmaker’s life and, in turn, becomes the material for a new film.

From film to film, private stories come together to form a broader narrative about time, memory and the search for a foothold. The protagonists move between countries and eras, looking into the past in order to understand the here and now; they explore other people’s lives in order to recognise their own destiny.

Different in form and tone, these films are united by a movement towards reality — an attempt not so much to explain it as to encounter it face to face, without evading the truth of the time and the moment. Ultimately, cinema here becomes a way of asking questions that prove universal: Where are we? What binds us to the past? And how do we go on looking at the world when its familiar contours have forever changed?

Diana Abu Yousef, Katerina Beloglazova, Vasiliy Stepanov with the participation of Mikhail Ratgauz