September 18: Fourth Day of the Festival

Briefly about the selected screenings of the 4th day of Message to Man festival.

International Competition program of September 18 has 7 new films in 3 screenings.

“Corneliu Porumboiu proves to be the subtle and witty director, who reproduces the absurd tragicomedy of modern man at minimal costs. In this case, it is a minor official Laurentiu who doesn’t aspire to be a hero, but who is obsessed with a great plan to reform football,” Alexei Medvedev, Curator of the Competition, on Infinite Football.

“The film speaks on a social issue, which suddenly turned out to be extremely hot —slavery. We all thought that it was in the past, but suddenly it turned out that, according to international organizations, a huge number of people work for free and involuntarily, that is, in fact, as slaves. In Russia, and in Europe, and in other remote places. On the other hand, A Woman Captured is also an incredibly inspiring story of liberation. This is one of the new trends in documentary films: the director ceases to be just an observer and helps the main character,” Alexei Medvedev on A Woman Captured.

“The art-doc about people at the South Pole is amazing, and it’s very difficult to amaze us. Polar explorers sit in their laboratories and talk about the meaning of life, and for some reason it’s incredibly amusing,” Mikhail Zheleznikov, Chairman of the Selection Committee, on Out of the Gardens.

 

National Competition Program features 5 premieres.

For Russia For Faith is a film about a children’s camp in France that is fully devoted to Russia. Mostly there are emigrants or just children who speak Russian. They are all fans of the royal family, they talk a lot about Russian identity. The incomprehensible mix of the Soviet past and the tsarist times, and all of this in broken Russian,” Eugeniia Marchenko, Curator of National Competition.

 

On September 18 the second screening of Experimental Competition of short films In Silico will be held.

“The question of novelty is quite complex. Basically, there’s no such thing as ‘new’, and most of what we are looking at now was invented back in the 1920s. Can we consider the eighth film by the same director using the same technique ‘experimental’? I believe that we can, because it is very interesting to follow the director, who has been investigating the same topic for a long time.

For example, The Stream VIII by the famous Japanese director Hiroya Sakurai: his eighth film about a stream, which he shot in eight years. We find ourselves inside some kind of inconspicuous irrigation ditch, and it opens a whole magical world,” Mikhail Zheleznikov.

 

Superreal Cinema Special Program  includes Shoplifters by Hirokazu Kore-eda and Three Faces by Jafar Panahi. Both films received awards at the Cannes Festival. There will also be a re-run of 3 Days in Quiberon on 18 September.

“In the opening of Three Faces, the director receives a video message of a suicide via Telegram. Together with his friend-actress (to whom the message was originally addressed) is trying to figure out whether it was staged. “Was this edited?” – this question is literally a matter of life and death. The investigation that leads them to a godforsaken village in the north of the country will provide multiple occasions to talk about filmmaking and whether it has any significance for the world. Panahi has already found an answer to question for himself: he continues to make movies, regardless of any circumstances,” Andrei Kartashov, film critic.

“In his new film, which received the Palme d’Or of the Cannes Film Festival, the master of the generation Hirokazu Kore-eda portrays a group of people who grow like weeds, penetrate the body of the State and destroy it from within, testing for strength and changing the idea of what a family should look like.” Mikhail Zakharov, film critic.

 

IPMS 2018: Anniversary Programme includes 5 films by Mikhail Litvyakov (founder of Message to Man) and Irina Kalinina.

“This couple is so inseparable that even the name of the retrospective — IPMS, confusing at first glance — supports their complete creative and human fusion: IP stands for Irina Pavlovna, MS for Mikhail Sergeyevich, that together make their e-mail address @mail.ru, which is an address you can use to send your greetings and wishes. This anniversary program is a tribute of respect and love to the essential couple, who created and raised Message to Man, spending 20 years hand in hand, bringing up a whole new generation of pupils and cinema lovers,” Asya Aastafyeva.

You can find the complete schedule on our website.