Young Russian Cinema

The Young Russian Cinema section is the Festival’s standing chance to meet new Russian short films, fiction and documentary. Among the participants are debutants and filmmakers who have previously received awards at Message to Man. The two screenings were put together by the curators of the National and International Competitions. One of the section’s main threads this year is the bonds of kinship, the spaces of memory, and what remains inscrutably personal.

The screening assembled by the International Competition curators revolves around absence and loss: a father never met, or already gone (The Disc by Marina Sokol; Memory Is Me? by Vlada Lodesk); half-forgotten friends and dates (Calendar by Vladimir Kondrashov); the unlived possibility of another life (Empty Places by Alexei Chamin); or simply a life that keeps losing its ground and its bearings (Portrait of A. by Ildar Shayakberov). This is young cinema made in a time that works against youth, and these films acutely feel the “signs of fatigue” — to borrow the title of Maxim Kuzhba’s film, also in the programme.

The four films selected by the National Competition curators are devoted to waiting for the inevitable: childbirth, in Natasha Lyutik’s avant-garde Lullaby for Empty Rooms, which asks the viewer to tune to the screen; the death of a loved one, in Yana Kharasho’s heartbreaking yet consoling 1018 Months; funerals and the ceremonial routine that accompanies them, in Varvara Tsvetkova’s deceptively straightforward Transit; or even salvation, in Stepan Grigoryan’s sympathetic doc-comedy Waiting for the Savior. In none of these cases is the story reduced to mere acceptance. Life always fights for itself. Even in its quietest manifestations, it leans toward the light. Any biologist will tell you so.

Diana Abu Usef, Katerina Beloglazova, Pavel Pugachev, Alena Solntseva, Vasiliy Stepanov