Competition
Dir. Sergei Loban

Pretty, but lonesome girl meets a nihistic guy nicknamed Cyber Ranger on the Internet. First she drags him out of the virtual space on a real date, and then – to Cremea, where she continues to draggle him around with her – to the beach, dinner or discotheque – with fatal consequences for not so experienced in love affairs blogger.

In the second part of the film it is deaf young man Lyosha’s turn to come to the resort, together with a bunch of bohemian guys leaded by a impetuous Pioneer (the gang calls themselves a unit and wears red ties). Lyosha is followed by his old friends, who are also deaf and numb and ready to fight furiously for their right to stay the way they are in the face of the sounding world.

In the third novella the young and shy first-time director encounters his father – famous actor – after a long time of absence. The father wants his son to forgive and drags the boy to the wild nature – to be closer to wildlife and feel true spirituality.

Finally, in the last chapter of the movie an ambitious producer from Moscow takes his mentee, the look-alike of Viktor Tsoi for a tour, with the not so smart guy not aware of the fact that he is looking like an idiot in the eyes of the whole country.

The chapters of the films, named Love, Friendship, Respect and Cooperation, are crossed as the plot develops (the protagonists of one novella appear in others as extras) and rebound one from another with the same idea: that every given private tragedy feels like a banality, not only in the face of the eternity, but even being compared with another given private misery. This thought is also confirmed here by the fact that all of the protagonists of each chapter in the moment of crisis points say one and the same monologue, and the closer is the end of the films, the more piercingly those words sound.

The dramaturgy is interesting, but the way the screen space is organized is even more fascinating. Sergei Loban, who proved his talent of remaining realistic and precise in the bounds of grotesque genre in his previous work Dust, works here in the form of “quiet surrealism”. He takes reality as it is and doesn’t fabricate it, organizing it his own way instead, slightly turning the familiar accents. Having thrown away most of the fixations from which Russian cinema often suffers, the authors of the film are working with the most simple, most familiar details if life – Cremea, Tsoi, conversation about Jorge Luis Borges on the first date and constant drunken talks about ethics and aesthetics. The metaphors are also quite simple and obvious: in the moments of despair the real tempest hits the resort, in the moments of sincere yearning – the non-metaphorical fire happens. In some point of the story there appear a monstrous local producer, a wise cameraman, a miserable film director called Shpagin and another producer from Moscow, who is too sophisticated to realize that his stupid mentee gradually takes his life from him. The whole action starts looking self-ironical at the moment. At the very end of the film the miserable producer shouts: “By this gesture I wished to say…”, but, as it usually happens in such cases, he doesn’t have a chance to finish. Which is probably right. And from this point of view – not only this article should end right now, but to tell the truth, many it shouldn’t have been started at all.

Olga Artemieva

Perspectives
Dir. Ludwig Wüst

The director, having decided to make a new project, sets a casting at his place, which he also plans to tape on video. Having set the camera in such manner that there would be just red sofa, piano and the front door seen in picture, he presses “rec” – and the recording is going to stop in sixty minutes – this is the time “Tape End” lasts, which is made in single shot, in one take.

An actress come to the casting – the same one, the director has been working ten years ago. And something says that it wasn’t just plain work. The rehearsal gets interrupted by director’s wife and daughter, but soon they leave. When they are finally left alone it takes only ten minutes for the actress to put up a fight with the director, say some awkwardly rude words and blame him for all that went wrong in her life – from a forced abortion to her “lost youth”. Then, first her head is lying on his shoulder, then she is already sitting on his knees and soon – between his knees.

In the absence of the other artistic instrumentation, the film is based upon almost exclusively on the acting. This is the task Ludwig Wüst is challenging his actors with – to improvise, as much as they can, in the cramped bounds of the story. And this is also the thing the director is asking the stress to do in the film.
So the most interesting part here is to watch the improvisation of the real actress and that one of her character being crossed. When she breaks into tears, telling him that she was forced to make an abortion because she “didn’t want to have children with such moron” – was she sincere of was she just getting into her role? And in the moment she started to unbutton his pants?..

Unfortunately, this improvisation is not that powerful to keep the viewer’s attention for sixty minutes straight. The most agonizing moments are those of significant pauses between dialogues, when either nothing is happening or the sound of running water in the shower can be heard. This situation gets partially made up by the end of the film, when the woman demonstrates that she doesn’t need a professional education to be a real actress. Especially, when she is inspired by such powerful feeling as jealousy.

Nikita Kartsev

Competition
Dir. Nikolay Khomeriki

Once upon a time lived a young man named Kostya – employee of subway, with apartment, mother, girlfriend, and other standard features of normal life. One day Kostya went to see doctor to make EKG, which resulted in doctors telling him that he’s almost perfectly healthy, except for the fact that he has some illness of the heart, with which he could die any day – not necessarily that he would, but still. Kostya then drank some vodka in karaoke-bar and went on to live what’s left of his life – maybe a day, maybe a year, or maybe even hundred years – but still, his pictured in black and white life, lived by the uniform buzz of the outside world.

It may seem like the EKG divides Kostya’s life into two parts, as it usually goes – before and after, but this is not completely true: the scene in a hospital is the opening scene of the film, so there is formally no “before”, which only stays implied somewhere, beyond the screen space – just like the fact that this “before” is not so different from “now”. Using this slide of dramaturgy, the authors of the film turn the story told from the plot about how a man’s life’s changing after some fateful new, into a story about how impossible it is to really change it. If, if one would go a little more further, - about how fatal can a pronounced word turn out to be. The unsophisticated statement that every given person – despite his own capacities, talents or ambitions – can stop existing any minute, being articulated and properly addressed, has the effect of gardening equipment with which one is being heat on the head – no doubt it is a little awkward, but still effective.

To make the point more obvious the main protagonist of the film is chosen among those, not even average, but minimally tending for any kind of existential self consciousness. So Kostya embarks on his “free voyage” more intuitively than consciously. The material of abstract categories is developed on a level of everyday life. But even on this level any labors not to be a “clock orange” disappear. Every exit beyond the bounds of system turns out to be some absurdity.

In the process of this Odyssey Kostya discovers the unpleasant truth about life being the sequence of physiological actions, which he lived, but had never felt or seen. However, it turns out that – just like in the case of gardening equipment, it is hard to answer something reasonably to this statement. Sure, one can always refuse to see his heart as an organ of human body and find somewhere its traditional poetic meaning. But it can easily lead to even more tragic repercussions – what if you finally find this poetic meaning, but instead of a symbol or a metaphor there will turn up a paper valentines card?

Olga Artemieva

Competition
Dir. Kaneto Shindo

Kaneto Shindo is the holder of the absolute record in the history of the Moscow Film Festival. He is the only one who took he main trophy three times: in 1961 (“The Naked Island”), in 1971 (“Live Today, Die Tomorrow”) and 1999 (“Will to Live”). On the 28th of April he turned 99 and all the younger competitors (especially the young ones!) should learn from him something about the thoughtful and unique mis-en-scene in every shot, the ability to foresee the end result when all these dissimilar episodes are brought together to make an organic whole. About the incredible precision in the timing of the narration which makes it possible to teach the student the art of scriptwriting, taking just this movie as an example. About that knowledge, lost even in Hollywood, of how to make a film larger than life without making it stylized or old-fashioned. In short, if the Golden George chooses him for a fourth time, it would only be justified.

The action begins in 1944 in the Tenrikyo Headquarters, where a hundred sailors toiled for a month to turn a sheer fleabag into a military base and a marine transfer point. Now they are getting further assignments by lots drawn by their commanders. Most of them will sail to conquer the Philippines, only a handful will be sent to reequip the Takarazuki theatre into another military base. Among the majority are a lard bucket, a candy hound and a funny performer of love songs Sazuo Morikawa. On the eve of the departure he leaves a note with his friend Keita, assigned to Takarazuka. It is a short postcard from his wife saying: “Today is the day of the carnival, but it is so empty without you”. He asks Keita to take it to his wife if he dies, which he surely will.

Why Keita will appear on the Morikawa widow’s doorstep only after 5 years and one hour of screen time later you will learn after watching the film, but the amount of events, happening during this period, will be enough to fill three series. There will be solemn scenes of seeing the soldiers off to the front to the pioneer-like spirited marches composed by Yukio Naguchi, and the placement of the urns of those who died in battle, reminding one of the marionettes theatre. There will be the hilarious episode of the instant death of a heart attack, the laconic style of which arouses memories of the silent cinema of the 1910s, and the hear-rending vision of sleepy sailors whose faces fade in the pre-dawn darkness of non-existence after the roll-call like lanterns in the night. There will be the Bollywood interlude in a striptease bar, the black-and-white chronicle of Hiroshima and the waves of such an emerald color which for some reason you can get only on Fuji Film. And only then the encounter of the man and the woman will take place. And the film, which is sadly enough always relevant, telling us that every soldier with his lot and number is some one’s dearest candy-hound, hulk and loud-mouth and is very much needed there.
Like all great cinema, “Postcard” is a one hundred per cent actors’ film.

Most surely, Shindo uses everything at the director’s disposal to support his actors: shows a close-up of the man’s face so that we could feel ill-at-ease because of the hysterics of the woman, left in the depth of the set, through the silence and the downcast gaze of the man, who is listening to her. Or wraps the head of the village elder in a kerchief like an old granny so that we could enjoy the comic situation when the man is caught eavesdropping. And when it comes to the men’s rough-and-tumble before the eyes of the thrilled widow, the showcase of judo, karate and boxing techniques will be presented in the rays of the vigorous sun over their heads.

Etsushi Toyokawa playing Keita deserves a special compliment: no one since Tatsuya Nakadai managed to move so graciously and look so stunningly good in yukata. After this hypnotic performance the question why the unforgettable role of the one who “lived daringly and died daringly”, played by Nakadai in Kurosawa’s “Tsubaki Sanjuro” half a century ago, was given to Toyokawa in the recent remake will be answered once and for all.

Alexey Vasiliev

Perspectives
Dir. Frank Spano

The starting point for the action in the film is the real extremal situation, resurrected on screen with documentary shots of the wild outrage of nature. Streams of rain water, sweeping away bridges, houses, streets. Unprecedented flood happened on the North cost of Venezuela in 1999 – with 15 thousand victims and many people disappearing without a trace. Information about such disasters is branded upon our conscience just like that – in illegible details and panoramic shots that all look alike. The author of the film, famous actor Frank Spano, who’s debuting as a director, changes wide shot for a close shot, whipping away two destinies from this tragic whirl. He also points out the question, which is also relevant for the audience: how do you survive, when everything is lost, when your past has been swept away, and you are standing all alone with your grieve.

Two protagonists: 40 year old Isabel and 17 year old Yudeixi leave for Isabel’s native land – Spain, or to be more precise - the Canary Islands, to start a new life and get a chance to have some decent – maybe not future, but at least the present. They have nothing in common, except the loss of their loved ones: Isabel has lost her husband, and Yudeixi’s lost her child. Isabel – a medical nurse, is a beautiful intelligent woman, filled with inner grace and unbearable pain in the same time. That’s the way this character is portrait by the Spanish actress Rosana Pastor. Her adolescent companion Yudeixi has grown up on a street and was living on picking; she is daring and rebellious. Despite the fact that Isabel perfectly recalls the face of the girl, who has robbed her in a hotel’s hall just before the flood happened, she is helping her to get on a plane, having presented herself as her mother. From this moment on, their lives are tied together, despite that they differ in just about everything – their outlooks on life, their habits, manner and the way they talk – slang words that Yudeixi uses is hard would be hard to find in a dictionary. And this contrast creates the main strain of the action, centering on the development of the heroines’ relationships, who has suddenly become emigrants. Isabel will be telling her young friend that “thieving means slowly dying”, and will explain who Hitchcock is and what suspense is. Thought soon she will be forced to forget her principles and start making money for a living by transporting illegal Peruvian workers from the airport. And one day Yudeixi will run off with a big sum of money – an advance received by Isabel from their employer – and tries to live independently, working as a dancer. Fabulous Canary Islands – a delightsome place for Russian tourists – is shown her from a different perspective: without common landscapes, but through the eyes of those who doesn’t relax, but works.

The final can be called a happy ending – Yudeixi comes back to Isabel with the money, she earned. She has now started to think about her life and not just about how to survive, like before. Together with Isabel and a little Peruvian boy she saved, they come back to Venezuela. And that’s how the transformation of alienated people to a real family has finally happened – as well as Frank Spano’s debut as director.

Tatiana Vetrova

Perspectives
Dir. Rob Nilsson

A small sketch from the life of Ukrainian emigrant woman Miri, who – after her husband had deceased – is trying to contrive the small hotel she owns, placed in a porch of a house in some troubled district of San Francisco suburbs. There is an international cacophony of sounds in the air – English, German and French tongues are found side by side with the story about Holocaust told by Ukrainian host on a radio and with the sounds of Russian songs, coming from the only decent restaurant in this distinct. The community is quite relevant. There is homeless who’s feeding Miri, when things get too bad. A seller in a small shop, who’s come to USA from Germany. A black man, who’s living in Miri’s hotel with his children and stealing money from her to buy drugs. A female bartender – also and emigrant (from Paris), who is playing solitaire and is bragging about the love adventures of her past. Soon Miri’s niece will suddenly come with a visit and will experience some difficulties getting used to all this poor scenery.

Just the same thing – poor scenery, but of the film, not the hotel – is the first thing to be noticed, even before the main credits start. Rob Nilsson, being classic and cult figure of American independent cinema and also one of the first authors to start experimenting with video, has finally come to extremes in his aspiration to move far away from traditional cinema. Image in “The Steppes” reminds of that shot by mobile phone. The sound is recorded by microphones hidden under the clothes, with results in awful rasp in moments of embracement. Outside, the sound of wind is so strong, that almost drowns the words of characters, and real citizens of San-Francisco function as extras, seemingly having no idea they are being pictured. But one can easily adapt to all of this: together with respectabilities the characters start to lose their masks, which differs them from real people. Abrupt picturing starts looking as the fragment from someone’s private archives, and all together it turns out to be one more proof of the common statement that it doesn’t really matter what optics does the author use. What matters is what this optics is picturing.

Nikita Kartsev

This year we have finally made a short film contest, and we made it in the Internet. This is importaint for two reasons: first, short films section has never been a contest before, and we are happy that this first competition is users' choice, because viewers are usually the most honest audience. Second thing is the Internet - partly or fully, movig into the interactivity is a powerfull tendency among the festivals, and like it or not, it is tomorrow.

Also, it's locigal that first Internet competition is short films one - shorts have always been the most flexible and fresh area of the cinema. Most of the authors are young and independent, so their films really reflect what they wanted to say, especially if it is something linked to videoart, formal experiments animation - short films are very good territory for the experiments. For this year's contest we selected films that are very different - by genre, by language, by author's point of view - and our only request for the audience is not to be preconcieved. We are very interested ourselves in the results of the competition.

http://vision.rambler.ru/cinema/17223229/
Please, enjoy the films!

Perspectives
Dir. Mounir Maasri


Any director is flattered when he turns out to be a prophet. At a meeting some two years ago a young filmmaker was passionately insisting that the scenes with “bad cops” had been shot in that very precinct which later became notorious because of the major Yevsyukov’s case. He lamented that they had cut out the sign-boards. If that is the case, then Mounir Maasri can smile modestly without having to prove anything to anybody. His movie about revolutionary unrest in the Middle East (events in Lebanon ten years ago) was released perfectly on time. Including “direct hits”: Syria is the hot news and in “Huvelin Street” the group of merry students fight the army of that country…

There is no need to go into the subtleties of Middle-eastern history (who occupied whom and why and what is the pretext for the presence of foreign troops in the country) to understand the restlessness of these youngsters for whom their not too secret activities in the underground student organization as merely part of their tumultuous, risky youth, their robust life. That is what is so charming about all their gatherings, get-togethers with girls and guitars and heated arguments about the best way to oppose the military: by surprise or silently with stickers saying “Freedom” covering their mouths. The night before the final face-down these nice guys boisterously smoke at the poker table and ask each other what is going to happen the next day. The metaphor for the message of the movie (or at least one of the messages) could be the scene in which Joy, a dark-haired revolutionary, can barely drag the heavy suitcase into his room in the hostel. “Flags? Leaflets?” demands the strict janitor. Somehow Joy manages to persuade him that it is only summer clothes. Anything could be expected, even weapons, but instead a girl jumps out of the suitcase in the room. It can’t be helped. In Russian just like in Lebanon, guards in hostels are especially strict about the morals of the students.

This does not invalidate their sincere hatred of the occupants. In general where there is public spirit, the youthful student racket becomes more meaningful. The youngsters are so passionately running about the night campus, hiding Lebanese flags in the bushes. How enthusiastically they meet an American journalist in a café: they seem to be saying very bold things, but at the same time are fearful lest it all should appear in the news.

But the principal plotline seems a bit artificial. Ives, an incipient journalist, is happy to have acquired a new camera and can now shoot everything during their gatherings. But the sudden (!) realization of how misery his salary is, forces him to sell the most explosive shots to the newspaper… It is hard do say why he opens the Pandora box: the driving forces, the conditions, the conflict are – to put it bluntly – a far cry form the “Ascent” by Larisa Shepitko. But there is a certain fundamental truth. It is felt in the demands of friends that Ives, a creative personality, should fight almost with an automatic gun, but he is not at all happy about the idea that word should be equaled to bayonet. It probably is no accident that in one of the scenes the director makes Ives sit next to Che Gevara’s portrait. The haircut, the beard, the moustache are all exact copies of those in the picture. This is the message: don’t put pressure on a creative personality, he will definitely sell everybody out.

Igor Saveliev

Perspectives
Dir. Lee Young-mi

A woman in her forties, a university professor, is carrying out scientific research on a relevant theme: “Changes in female psychology following marital unfaithfulness”. The story of her unfortunate personal life (but that is a big “secret”) is told by… an inanimate object, by a copier, so let us forgive a certain straightforwardness of the narration. The copier is worried: since the time its owner hired a new assistant for her sociological research, her life has become all messed-up. The young man has the looks of a super model as though he stepped down from the video supplement to the South Korean version of “Penthouse”.
It became especially noticeable after the professor and the student interviewed a lascivious woman who enthusiastically cheated on her husband and had no remorse about it.

This fateful encounter had a deep effect on the professor. She looked at her student with different eyes and it occurred to her academic mind to do with him what is very reluctantly indulged in (judging by the movie) with middle-aged women in South Korea. But her views which proved to be not so liberal prevented this lady with the Internet nickname “Liberalcunt” from accomplishing an instant transition from words to actions. There are a number of reasons. First of all, the rigid morals still do not allow a South Korean woman (especially an older one) to look upon a man (especially a youth) as a sexual “object” (the morals, naturally, do not look the other way). Secondly, the traditional Confucian approach denies any erotic overtones in the lofty relations between the teacher and the disciple.

In her feature-length debut, which caused an uproar in her native country, the 45-year-old feminist Lee Young-mi boldly challenged the obsolete taboos, but unfortunately did no find the radical artistic means to express these legitimate protests. Feminine sexual longing is shown with the help of trite metaphors worthy of erotic Hollywood blockbusters like “Wild Orchid” or “Two Moon Juncture”, intended for the same grateful audience but shot by men. Subconsciously copying those movies, the brave Young-mi turns her romantic hero into a voyeristic sexual object, who is as animate as silicone sex symbols from movies directed by males. They admire females as impotents would and possess them purely symbolically.

Stas Tyrkin

Competition
Dir. Dragan Bjelogrlić

The characters in the film are often wiping out their tears. One would say – isn’t it usual for a Eastern European film about some events of the 20th century? – and would be completely wrong. Because those are the tears of joy. Dragan Bjelogrlić’s film is unique in its own way for contemporary cinema – it is optimistic all the way through. The movie starts with a scene of virtuosic football play performed by a young boy called Tirke. As it usually goes, Tirke find it difficult to find a job, which saddens his mother, but constantly insists that he has a strong moral core, conscience and ethics instead. And when Tirke’s skills are noticed by Bosko Simonovic, the feature coach of the national team… Well, the following course of the film is easy to predict: up to a huge success of Serbian national team in the play vs. Bulgaria.

It is interesting to watch this almost chemical reaction, which is being built by the director: to watch a few dashing boys create an almost sacred fraternity and develop such “triumph of will” that it seems like they could make almost anything. Let’s say, to get to World Cup in Montevideo, where they didn’t even hoped to come. Or knock teeth out of a jerky son of the Prime Minister. Or to dislocate from jail to royal castle… It seems like they could really make anything.

The subplot “soccer instead of war” starts to sound in the film in a subtle way: everybody knows, what’s going to happen in Europe in a few years, when it will be no time for sport (the action takes place in 1930). FIFA has just been created. World Cup in Montevideo is the first one in history. Most of the characters in the film take words “soccer” and “Montevideo” as some kind of swearing and can’t understand how grown up men can waste their time on this. Of how can anyone barter away a position of apprentice at the factory “Ikarus” to be a leading forward in the national team… Films about people who put their houses up, lie to their relatives and risk everything, believing in nothing but their dream, have some purgative meaning. So after “Montevideo” one would probably want to let all the routine fly, throw away the cell phone, right here, by the cinema hall, and run away anywhere where the real life is.

And in the same time Serbs would not be themselves, if their national tragedy didn’t reflect through the football drive of the film. The King is willing to send “the national team of Yugoslavia” to the championship, but on a condition that there will be some Croations in there. The Croations refuse. A local tycoon is ready to put his money in the trip, but only if the team will be called Serbian, and not Yugoslavian. It is the team now who says no… And so you start to shiver unwillingly, when you hear the words: “Yugoslavia has signed a convention with the court in Hague”.

It is not without a reason that the film may seem simple-minded at first. The key to it lies in the words, that are pronounced in the first minutes on screen. “It was the best decade – after the big war… Then we didn’t yet what a real big war means”. The times before war are always simple-minded. In fact, the 21st of June in 1941 in Russian films is filled with sounds of “Riorita”.

The best players of the film, Tirke and Mosa are often having fun playing with a raw chicken egg. And a prophecy is told: ones who are able not to break the egg by playing with it, are going to die soon. The real Mosa (Blagoje Marjanovic) and Tirke (Aleksandar Tirnanic), the stars of soccer, have lived a long life. But artistic world has its own laws. And you never know, what’s waiting for these dashing boys after “the best decade” will be over.

Igor Saveliev