Developing. The Leningrad School of Documentary Cinema

The programme is dedicated to the cinematographer Petr Mostovoy, who passed away on 30 January 2026.

In 1946, the Leningrad Newsreel Studio moved into the building on Kryukov Canal and, like any Soviet studio, operated within the system of state commission. Documentarians filmed the city’s largest events and the successes of Leningrad’s industry. From time to time, though, auteur cinema also emerged inside that production machine. It was made by various people, in different decades, yet it shared a great deal: lyric humanism and a poetic sense of the everyday on one side; Aesopian language, an interest in the person inside the epoch, and an eye for the gap between the official and the human on the other.

Today, the studio’s legacy needs to be rediscovered — for audiences and filmmakers alike. Up-and-coming Russian documentarians and film students are sometimes unaware of just how strongly they are influenced by the tradition of figurative non-fiction, passed down from their mentors, while younger viewers are barely familiar with the Leningrad Studio of Documentary Film (LSDF).

Individual LSDF films and directors have already been featured at Message to Man. However, so far as we can establish, there has never been a comprehensive programme at the Festival that would present the studio across decades, methods, and stages of its development.

We want to show LSDF works not as archival rarities but as a living and highly valuable artistic tradition. A further reason for turning to them now is the 60th anniversary of Leonid Kvinikhidze’s Marina’s Life and Pavel Kogan’s Look at the Face — 1966 films that were called defining works by the studio.

The programme was prepared with the support of the Guild of Non-Fiction Film and Television.

Vitalina Zakharova, Maksim Matvienko