13.11.2026 at 19:30. Echo: Moscow. Evening Light, secret [mis]communication system, L’uomo più bello del mondo / The Most Beautiful Man in the World, Hei Dong Dong / Dark Channel, Press Enter to Finish the Day, Textus Connectivus, Two Pids, Illusion of Reality, I Don’t Repeat It Twice, Garage Museum

Description

An experiment in which documentary footage is set against its own versions, reworked and “brought to life” by AI. The film faces the viewer with questions of truth, memory, perception, and the evolution of reality in digital space.

About the director:

Liza Zenkova

Born in Novosibirsk. In 2019, she pursued higher education in St. Petersburg. In 2022, she was a resident at Gosfilmofond and served on the student jury of the 32nd Message to Man IFF. In 2024, she graduated from the St. Petersburg State University of Film and Television with the diploma film Alone with Oneself. In 2025, as part of a laboratory run by the Culture 360 festival, she worked on Illusion of Reality.

Description

Russian premiere

The household plastic tarpaulin so widely used in cities becomes a source of distortions in space and time, as if the laws of quantum mechanics had been transferred to the macroscopic world. Places far apart are gathered into a single field that lives by its own paradoxical rules. We find ourselves inside a cinematic arabesque, in which shots join into a continuous, intricate ornament unfolding in time.

About the director:

Mikhail Basov

Video artist and filmmaker. Born in 1977 in Taganrog. Participant and award-winner at numerous international exhibitions and festivals of film and video art, including the WRO Media Art Biennale, Kasseler Dokfest, Japan Media Arts Festival, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, São Paulo International Short Film Festival, Doker, and the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival, among others. A long-standing friend of Message to Man, he served as a jury member in 2020 and as a participant in the In Silico Experimental Film Сompetition in 2018 and 2022. In 2025, he presented a retrospective of his work and gave a masterclass.

Description

Russian premiere

After the world premiere of his film ‘Being John Smith’ at the Toronto International Film Festival, an unexpected encounter in a hotel elevator leads the filmmaker to question the nature of reality.

About the director:

John Smith

Director and artist. Born in 1952 in Walthamstow, London. He studied at the North East London Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art. Since 1972, Smith has made more than 60 films, videos, and installations, shown in independent cinemas, art galleries, museums, and on television around the world. In 2012, John Smith attended Message to Man as a jury member for the In Silico experimental film competition, and presented a retrospective of his work. Since then, Smith has participated in the Festival on several occasions. This year, two of his films have been included in the Prompted Reality special programme.

Description

Russian premiere

Through the testimony of an employee haunted by work-related dreams, this film explores how work seeps into our nights, affecting our mental health. Meanwhile, video games offer a refuge where players eagerly embrace challenges and missions, often within virtual spaces that replicate the very workplaces at the root of their suffering.

About the director:

Coralie H. Gourdon

Documentary filmmaker from French Polynesia currently based in Athens. Her work explores inventive forms of documentary, blending fiction and non-fiction and drawing on a range of film genres. She studied literature, social anthropology and filmmaking at the Sorbonne, then took part in international masterclasses under mentors including Ariane Mnouchkine and Béla Tarr. In 2021, she participated in the Werner Herzog Accelerator in Lanzarote, where she directed her short documentary Animal Planet. Her film Time Sensitive Characters, which also turns on aspects of sleep, was selected for the Kiberglaz special programme at the 34th Message to Man International Film Festival.

Description

One member of the family is not remembered – only 25 photos of the uncle who died of AIDSremain. His nephew asks both his mother, who looks back via the pictures, and AI tool Google Vision API, which reads the photo data statistically. Memory cultures.

About the director:

Paolo Baiguera

Filmmaker. Born in 1998. He has worked on a range of projects for Sky, Rai, Kon-Tiki Film, Indigo Film, ANG Film, and Ring Film. He collaborated with Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis on Heads or Tails? (2025), selected for the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival. His debut short film, The Lost Child, premiered at the 2025 Venice International Film Critics’ Week where it received a special mention.

Description

World premiere

6 October 2025

in the evening, the impossible happened

A white horse walked into a prison

looked into the cells,

came out into the light

About the director:

Roman Mikhailov

Born in Riga in 1978. Mathematician, writer, theatre and film director. Author of ten films, eight books and more than a dozen stage productions. Laureate of the Andrei Bely Prize.

Description

World premiere

The film is based on the drawings and graphic illustrations taken from the patent “Secret Communication System”, registered as US2292387.

When work on radio-controlled torpedoes began in the early 1940s, it became clear that an enemy would have little trouble intercepting the frequency of a control signal. In 1942, to fix that problem, the film actress Hedy Lamarr and the composer George Antheil proposed changing the carrier frequency of transmitter and receiver by means of a perforated paper tape, of the kind used in a player piano. Lamarr and Antheil’s invention folded musical logic into the mechanics of war, fulfilling the modernist utopia’s hope that art and technological progress might pass into one another.

About the director:

Nikita Spiridonov

Artist, composer, curator, and founder of the u/n multitude collective. In the context of the artistic practice of u/n multitude, he explored the political dimension of sound, creating performances and political scores. As a video artist, Spiridonov continues to take historical events as a starting point and investigates the difficulties of memory work along with the ways of remembering. Spiridonov is a participant of numerous exhibitions, including: Orchestras (Solyanka Gallery, Moscow, 2016), Notes for Tomorrow (diverse cities, 2021-2025), Limits of visibility (CCA Winzavod, Moscow, 2025). He participated in the In Silico competition of Message to Man IFF with Volga Song, Dots, Lines and Zigzag, Meat Grinder 2 and secret [mis]communication system 2 (Jury diploma).

Description

Russian premiere

On a rainy day, ripples tremble in a culvert.

About the director:

Yu Zhe

Filmmaker. Born in 1988, he lives in Shijiazhuang, China. His short films Hot Hunt Heat (2010) and Wind Blows the Greenhouse (2017) have screened at international festivals. In 2026 he released his first feature film titled Go South.

Description

Russian premiere

Each new attempt to remember becomes a re-recording: images pile up, distorting and erasing the original recollection. The film is built on a metaphor of memory as analogue tape, worn down irreversibly with every playing. It explores the blurred line between an event and the interpretations that follow, turning personal memories into a space of uncertainty.

About the director:

Ksusha Kernosenko

Filmmaker. A graduate of Artur Aristakisyan’s workshop at the St. Petersburg School of New Cinema, she lives in St. Petersburg. Her work addresses memory and the past, seeking a balance between the sensory and the conceptual.