On the third day of the festival, visitors will be able to watch three film blocks of international feature and short-film competition (each feature film is paired with a short film):
- Overseas tells a story of Filipino domestic servants who are trained before being sent to their «masters». Sung-A Yoon, film director: Filipinos are often portrayed as obedient and naturally predisposed to take care of children and the elderly. I wanted to destroy this stereotype and to show that they have personalities and are not just weak-willed victims; they are not statistics. This film that addresses the topic of movement of people will be paired with a short film It’s Going to be Beautiful about the Trump wall on the US-Mexico border.
- A Punk Daydream studies Indonesian punk scene. Young people against conservative society. Jimmy Hendrickx, film director: «For me, it’s important to meditate on our feelings of connection and disconnection with our surroundings». The film will be preceded by a short film Swatted about swatting, a cruel Internet prank, when somebody deploys a SWAT team to another person’s home. The filmmaker studies the topics of transparency and disconnectedness, trying to find the answer in game graphics.
- The Wind. A Documentary Thriller is a film about a natural phenomenon in Poland, where a special mountain wind makes people suicidal. Michał Bielawski, film director, said that the wind almost made the film its prisoner: «It was tempting to show one disaster after another, until the world on-screen is completely destroyed. But I wanted more.» Young protagonists of David Verbeek’s Trapped in the City of a Thousand Mountains are far away from any natural disaster. The film director observes Chinese people listening to rap, while the authorities try to regulate the subculture that is aesthetically incompatible with it.
- If you missed the first programme block, it will be repeated in the afternoon.
National competition includes two blocks; the films here are not divided into feature-length and short and all take part in the same programme.
- The second block includes a dynamic film Where Did Your Bride Go? about the girls who fight for their right to play football and not just dream about footballers. This film sits next to Robin Chicas about two medical college graduates travelling to Guatemala.
- Block 3 includes Kind Souls about provincial-town dwellers who come up on stage in the evenings and Mommy, I Love You So Much, which again addresses the topic of «unwomanly» sports: the film’s protagonist is training her children to be mixed martial artists.
- You can also revisit the first competition block.
In the evening, the screenings of In Silico experimental competition start. Velikan Park hall 4 opens a programme 100 years of VGIK, which shows the student films made by several generations of its graduates, from Nikita Mikhalkov and Rustam Khamdamov to Anna Melikyan and Pyotr Buslov.
The Superrreal Cinema programme has two premieres. One is the Russian première of Les misérables by Ladj Ly. Its story takes place in the district of a commune of Montfermeil, where some of the events depicted in Hugo’s novel took place two centuries before. In late 2010s, Montfermeil still is not a very nice place: France’s policy of multiculturalism fails to gain traction, school students gang up and the police use brute force instead of greetings. The St Petersburg première is The Wild Goose Lake by Diao Yinan. Nikita Smirnov: «The Lake… is called a Chinese noire. The tensely wound main plot springs are a sign of a classic Hitchcockian suspense, yet its intensive neon pauses can be compared to the works of Nicolas Winding Refn and its romantic non-meetings of characters, with the films of Wong Kar-wai. If you wind back time a bit, key signs of French poetic realism transpire: a set scene and uneasy flow of minutes before the date with Destiny.»
The Collapse of Socialism programme shows a film fresco The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu. Katerina Beloglazova, the programme’s curator: The film uses newsreels of the socialist Romania that recorded the entire political life of its general secretary who was eventually executed. Of course, much can be gleaned from between the frames of the official newsreel: not just what intonation the ideologized regime chose to represent itself from year to year, but what images accompanies Ceausescu’s rise as a strongman and how different type of representation stripped him of his “magical” aura of a leader almost overnight.
In the morning, Saint Petersburg State University of Film and Television will hold a master class by Inger Lise Hansen and Tinne Zenner, whose films take part in the programme Nordic Avant-garde (they will be screened in the Aurora cinema).
In the evening, the Saint Petersburg School of New Cinema is hosting a meeting with Ranko Paukovic, a film director and sound designer: his 90 Seconds in North Korea takes part in the In Silico programme. He will tell about working with sound and the role of sound editing.
