At the film festival in St. Petersburg they told how to make a movie from what rots in the ground

Russian directors recognized themselves in the ordeals of Michel Gondry’s hero

The International Film Festival “Message to Man” opened in St. Petersburg for the 33rd time, where until recently they presented exclusively documentary, animated and short films, and more recently they have been showing “super-reality cinema”

Director and producer Alexey Uchitel introduced the tradition of showing the opening film not after the official festival start, but before it, as guests from the screening run away and there is a gaping void in the hall. For the opening we chose a movie about cinema – “The Book of Decisions” by French director Michel Gondry. His debut film “Animal Nature” was shown in Cannes. Gondry won an Oscar for his original screenplay for The Shining of the Spotless Mind and was nominated for a Cesar Award and a BAFTA Award. And then one of the most talented filmmakers of our time, after a series of failures, certainly relative ones, did not shoot for several years. He taught and built an entire village where people learn to watch and make films.

Once upon a time, Björk saw Gondry’s music video and offered to make several videos together for the Grammy Awards, which then received four nominations. The strange hero of “The Book of Decisions” – the young and crazy director Mark – also made a video with the star, and now the whole village where his lonely aunt lives is proud of him.

Mark can change his plan instantly by finding a fallen leaf with a hole on the ground. You look into it, and the world looks different. “The glasses grow straight from the ground,” Mark will say joyfully. – A hole instead of a monocle.” This is an idea and a reason to re-shoot and re-edit everything. Fragments from his crazy and funny film, where a man in a hat walks along a sad building, and a giant rat rushes behind him, appear on the screen constantly. Only the director himself will not dare to watch the editing of his film. Mark’s principles are: “Learn as you go” (you can conduct an orchestra even if you have never done it), “Don’t listen to what they tell you” (and do as you see fit). The main thing is to believe in yourself and your dream, and then Sting will agree to work with you. It doesn’t matter that even my colleagues can’t believe it. The real Sting is in Gondry’s film and the scenes are fantastic.

After the screening, our directors – Alexey Uchitel, Konstantin Lopushansky, Ivan Bolotnikov, and their young colleagues – said that Gondry’s film was about them. All talented people experience the pangs of creativity, feel emptiness and misunderstanding, but stubbornly go towards their goal.

Many of the current festival’s programs have been compiled by Alexei Medvedev, who for 10 years was the program director of Message to Man. He recently died under strange circumstances. His body was found not where he lived and could have been at all, near the railway tracks in the Moscow region, and for some reason the authorized organizations did not announce his discovery. Only when the Lisa Alert search group got involved in the case did the matter move forward. Alexey Uchitel took an active part in clarifying the circumstances of the tragedy. Many believe something happened that we don’t know about before the body ended up where it was found. At the opening ceremony of the festival, photographs of Alexey were shown – in his youth, with his wife and little daughter, with Werner Herzog and other prominent guests of the Message to Man. He was a talented person, well versed in cinema and loved it. But the final point of his life remained a question mark.

On the second day of the festival, they presented the film “Michael Douglas, Prodigy” directed by Amin Mestari about the life of the movie star and eldest son of Kirk Douglas. This is a picture of how the now winner of two Oscars and six Golden Globes, Michael Douglas, emerged from the shadow of his great father. .The only screening of the film by Japanese director Neo Sora “Ryuichi Sakamoto. Opus” about the last performance of the legendary composer a few months before his death.