Documentary filmed childbirth during covid

At the XXX festival of Russian cinema “Window to Europe”, in addition to the game competition, which is the main focus, a large and varied documentary program was presented. The whole life of the country is concentrated in it – the endangered Chukotka, the poetics of communal apartments, the world of the covid period and even childbirth on the air.

For documentary filmmakers, Window on Europe is a rare chance to show their films. Vladimir Krivov, one of the participants in the non-fiction film competition, who presented the film Torn Off (about the country’s record number of people ready to give up their lives), shot in Chukotka, said that festivals are the only way to contact a live audience.

“You can make a bad feature film, and the project will have a distribution. You can make a good documentary film, and the project will not be distributed,” Vladimir believes. At the same time, it sometimes takes years to create a non-fiction film, directors watch their heroes for seven to ten years. And then it all goes nowhere. People today do not go to cinemas, and this is a global trend, and even more so for documentaries. The pandemic, which we are beginning to forget, has played its role here.

Grigory Kurdyaev filmed Noah’s Ark for four and a half years in an Orthodox home for alcoholics, a dry law shelter for the homeless. And it was some kind of desperate and protracted experience, which became a kind of trauma for the director himself. But the game was worth the candle. The picture turned out to be powerful, with an interesting hero – a former businessman Emilian, who runs the shelter. Faith helped him make this choice. People live and work in this mournful house mainly for food and a roof over their heads.

Novy Mir by Denis Shabaev takes us back to the time of a hard lockdown. We forgot too quickly that he might be back any minute now. Empty airports, a world that has stood still on the screen. Mobile morgues have earned full power. People do not have the opportunity to send their loved ones on their last journey. Fortunately, such a service as an online funeral has appeared. More than 6 million people died all over the world in those terrible days – such statistics are given, and the numbers of losses are changing rapidly, the terrible calendar is running at high speed.

It’s funny to watch a man “float” around the apartment, lying on a skateboard. This is the only way for him to keep in shape. The priest comes out to the flock almost in a gas mask, and another urges not to believe in the reality of the coronavirus. People are protesting against forced vaccination and forced confinement, while thousands of people are dying in agony. President Lukashenko continues to play hockey, believing that a refrigerator is the best health and ice is an antiviral medicine.

Denis Shabaev ends the chronicle of events on February 11, 2022. The following days, which turned the world upside down, pushed back the pandemic. The audience knows what will happen next, but the characters of the film do not, and everything is perceived through double optics, setting a scale that the director could not even imagine.

Denis Shabaev used the video diaries of his heroes, who were at the time of the lockdown in Moscow, Paris, Dublin, Crimea and Afghanistan, around the world. Thus, a single space arose in which we are all connected by invisible threads and found ways of rapprochement in order to separate very soon. The characters in this film filmed themselves on mobile phones, and the director took this as a significant aesthetic of the time.

One of the characters is the mayor of Herat, a city in Afghanistan where many see the pandemic as a worldwide conspiracy against their country. Amazing shots where people cling to the landing gear of an aircraft that cannot take everyone on board, and then fall like a stone from a height to the ground.

Actor Farrukh, having no savings, found himself in a difficult situation during the days of the pandemic. He is forced to live in a car and participate in castings directly from the salon in the hope of getting at least some work in the cinema.

Actress Nargis Abdullaeva also lost her job in Moscow and was forced to come to Crimea to her mother, where she had not lived for the past twenty years. Everything there annoys her, because people live only by washing and cooking. She gets a job in a store and sells feed.

A family living in America sets up a tent in the courtyard of the house to somehow compensate for the failed trip. A couple from Kyiv ended up in isolation in Dublin, while their son stayed in Kyiv with his grandmother. How the fate of these people developed later, we do not know, and this creates an alarming background.

Documentary filmmaker Maria Chuprinskaya gives birth in front of our eyes, as they say, live. And at about the same time, her husband’s mother, producer Vlad Ketkovich, began to bleed.

In the days when the coronavirus raged, the presence of the husband at the time of childbirth was prohibited. However, Maria and Vladislav miraculously managed to get permission for this. All this reminded me of the film of the classic documentary Hertz Frank, filming his own heart surgery, when the outcome could be anything. So Maria Chuprinsky dared to do what only a true documentary filmmaker is capable of, and minute by minute recorded the most important day of her life.

Pavel Mirzoev made a highly artistic documentary film “How we lived in a communal apartment”, poetically telling about the social and close life in the building of the former apartment building of the Rossiya insurance company, where he happened to live as a child. Communal apartments are inhabited by many interesting people and even inspire. The artist Alexei Mikulin immortalized their images in his plasticine compositions.

Pavel Mirzoev’s grandfather (director of the Chisinau factory), father (director), Pavel himself and his mother lived in a communal apartment. This is the territory where you will never be alone, where the kitchens are like a market square and where you can borrow an onion from a neighbor. Artist Konstantin Sutyagin still continues to live in a communal apartment. The view from the window is more precious to him than comfort. Someone organizes a lyrical museum in a communal apartment, exhibiting all sorts of things there, and people can come from the street on a certain day and hour to share sentimental experiences.