A significant part of the program has already been shown at the festival in Rotterdam

The festival in Rotterdam has already shown a significant part of the program, which includes more than 1 thousand films. He talks about several included in the Tiger Awards competition Andrey Plakhov.

The competition is formed from the works of debutants. Sometimes this can be seen in the footage: the Japanese Tanaka Toshihiko, the author of the film “Rei,” could not even keep it to three hours. I had to watch it in two steps, but the effort was worth it. In the first half, the picture threatens to drown in a stream of chatter from rather ordinary people, of which only one stands out – the deaf and practically non-speaking photographer Masato. It is with him that the main character Hikari falls in love and travels with him in the depths of winter to the island of Hokkaido to cling to the transcendental beauty of the snow-capped heights. But in the second half the film turns out to be interesting not so much for its high poetry as for its earthly prose. In the heat of passions, heated by childhood traumas, adultery and loneliness, the echo of Dostoevsky is clearly heard. Or Shakespeare: “Let them take us quickly to prison. There we will sing like birds in a cage.” This tragic credo is instilled in the confused Hikari by her friend and lover by chance – a theater actor and director experiencing a creative crisis.

In the Iranian film “Me, Maryam, Children and 26 Others” (directed by Farshad Hashemi), life events are no longer shaded by theater, but by cinema. He breaks into the everyday life of lonely Maryam along with the film crew to whom the heroine had the misfortune of renting out her house. And she immediately regretted it: the filmmakers, not having time to enter, violated all the terms of the contract. They filled the kitchen with dirty dishes, pulled out an antique cup from the sideboard, and spilled coffee on a favorite old book. Maryam no longer feels at home even in her bedroom, and the only thing she dreams of is to save her late father’s precious painting of her and her sister. But very little time passes, and the heroine no longer wants to part with the unceremonious guests. And he even begins to give them creative advice: how to act out this or that episode more accurately and believably in front of the camera. This is how she escapes loneliness, but there is another, skillfully interspersed motive: cinema has a particularly high position in Iran, and the film, which is being filmed in Maryam’s house, is reminiscent of the Oscar-winning “The Divorce of Nader and Simin.”

Almost all of the films in the “Tiger Competition” are entertainingly conceived, but not all ideas are adequately executed. The Spaniard Alberto Gracia in the film “Parra” tries to fit the vague story of a restless hero into the atmosphere of the dying Galician city of Ferrol. Once a famous center of naval shipbuilding, also known as the birthplace of Francisco Franco, it is now in decline. A choir of old people singing mournful songs wanders around the city, young people become drunk without work, and one of the scourges of the area is the overabundance of cars that have nowhere to park – they turn into piles of rusty scrap metal. But what sounds intriguing in the retelling looks rather primitive on the screen and does not make an impression.

The competition includes several paradoxical and defiantly experimental works. Finnish “Moses” (directed by Jenny and Lauri Luhta) is a film-lecture given by an artist disguised as Sigmund Freud, based on his last work “Moses and Monotheism”. According to its concept of “psychohistory”, Moses was an Egyptian, not a Jewish slave, and this becomes a counterpoint to the situation of Freud himself – a Jew born in the Czech Republic, who ended his life fleeing the Nazis in London and surviving the outbreak of World War II for only three weeks war.

No less eccentric is the parallel drawn in the film Under a Blue Sun between the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Bedouin lands. French director Daniel Mann travels to the Negev Desert, where Rambo III was filmed in the late 1980s, and writes a letter to Sylvester Stallone urging him to help the poor Palestinians.

The German film “sr” (directed by Lea Hartlaub) was not without politics. The mysterious name translated from Egyptian hieroglyphs means “giraffe”; he is the main character of this picture, which tells about the clashes of a greedy and treacherous man with the defenseless animal world. And about timid attempts to preserve the miracle of nature, which was admired by Nikolai Gumilyov, who reminded his depressed lover that “an exquisite giraffe wanders on Lake Chad.”

The Russian film “Ashes and Dolomite” was not included in the competition, but was shown in the Bright Future program. It was directed by Toma Selivanova, who also plays a girl director who, together with a German musician friend, makes a trip through the ruins of the old Gulag. Archeology is not always 100% convincingly combined here with the psychology of the characters’ relationships, but what cannot be taken away from the picture is the felt spirit of the area. It is filled with traces and echoes of a historical tragedy; its proximity is emphasized by a subjective camera, an alarming sound sequence, and montage inclusions of video art. Apparently, this is one of the last films made on a painful topic of the past – with an obvious hint of present, and perhaps future, relevance.