Description
World premiere
While the Sky Is Watching is Roman Mikhailov’s tenth film in four years — his last before a long pause, or his last of all. This film about the shoot is a portrait of Mikhailov as a director, of his method, and of the singular world of underground dancers to which While the Sky Is Watching belongs.
It is easy to lose the thread in this making-of: Masha Chernaya is making a documentary about Roman Mikhailov making a fiction film about Valeriya Gai Germanika making a documentary. One thing is clear though: films need to be made.
About the director:
Masha Chernaya
Director, cinematographer, journalist, photographer, and illustrator. She studied journalism at the Moscow State University, poetry at the Gorky Literary Institute, and post-documentary photography at Docdocdoc School. She has taken part in documentary campus-expeditions in Sviyazhsk and Yuryevets. Her films Crooked Ray District (2019), The Well Man (2019), R2CC (2020), To Kill What Lives Inside Me (2022), and Retrospective (2026) have screened at Window to Europe, Rudnik, Zerkalo, Beat Film Festival, and elsewhere. To Kill What Lives Inside Me (2022) and Here’s to the Absent the Ladies! (2023) were included in the National Competition at Message to Man. In 2024 she released The Shards, which screened at major documentary festivals worldwide, including Bildrausch Filmfest Basel and Cosquín International Independent Film Festival, and won awards at Doc Alliance and DocLisboa.