Day 3 of Message to Man features four installments of National and International competitions, as well as nine films of the experimental competition In Silico. A number of online Q&As will be held, including those with five directors, whose works are part of the In Silico programme, and an offline meeting with Alexandra Pustynnova, author of the film Secondary World (Grand Prix at the Beat Film Festival).
“KIOSK”, directed by Alexandra Pianelli (2020)
The sixth installment of the International Competition features the Russian premiere of Kiosk by Alexandra Pianelli. Shot on the iPhone, the film is entirely set at a newspaper counter. Film critic Ksenia Rozhdestvenskaya notes: “It’s all around the kiosk: strikes, anti-gay rallies, rain, Paris, the world. A powerful movie about modern civilization, set on 2 square metres.”
“SECONDARY WORLD”, directed by Alexandra Pustynnova (2020)
The fifth installment of the National Competition includes Secondary World by Alexandra Pustynnova, a film about Russian geek culture which won the Beat Film Festival Grand Prix. Andrey Kartashov and Svetlana Semenchuk, writers at Iskusstvo Kino, comment on this documentary: “Studying the geek encyclopedia, from a distance precisely chosen by the director, not only helps to understand the characters “from another planet”, but also fall for their charm.” The filmmaker will answer questions from the audience after the screening.
“ALICE’S FOUR STORIES”, directed by Myriam Jacob-Allard (2019)
The first installment of the experimental competition In Silico features nine films from around the globe. Billy by the American filmmaker Zachary Epcar is a short-length work inspired by David Lynch, filmed in soft out-of-focus and scored with rustles and ASMR textures. Alice’s Four Stories by the Canadian directress Myriam Jacob-Allard is an inventive motion picture about memory and forgetting. It was presented at the International Film Festival Rotterdam earlier this year. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with five filmmakers.
“MALMKROG”, directed by Cristi Puiu (2020)
The Superreal Cinema programme presents second screenings of high-profile Romanian films. Uppercase Print by Radu Jude is an inventive docufiction about the confrontation between a graffiti artist and the authorities during the reign of Ceaușescu. Malmkrog by Cristi Puiu is an epic about the 20th century; the film, which is set within the walls of a Transylvanian villa, brought Puiu the Best Director award in the Encounters experimental section of the Berlinale). Film critic Alexei Filippov notes on Uppercase Print: “As he continues to explore the shift to the right in the Romanian society, Jude recovers this little national hero—the opposite of Pavlik Morozov—from the last decade of Ceaușescu’s reign.”
“NIGHTS OF CABIRIA”, directed by Federico Fellini (1957)
In the evening, as part of the “Gender Without Borders” retrospective, which is dedicated to 100th anniversary of the birth of Federico Fellini, his Nights of Cabiria will be screened in the main room of Aurora cinema. It is a bittersweet story of a prostitute named Cabiria, which brought Fellini an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Giulietta Masina, director’s wife and muse, won at the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.
