Film critic Yulia Shagelman about the winners of the Winter Film Festival

The Second Open Russian Film Festival “Winter” has ended in Moscow. The jury, chaired by producer Sofia Mitrofanova, chose “Panic Attacks” by Ivan I. Tverdovsky as his best film, and the prize for best director went to debutant from Yakutia Nikolai Koryakin, who directed the film “Timir”. Talks about the festival winners Julia Shagelman.

Cross-cutting theme competitive program The second “Winter”, intentionally or not, was the relationship between parents and children. The first film about connections and generation gaps was “White road!” Ella Manzheeva, who received a special jury prize with the wording “For reasoning on a complex topic.” The director translated the story of how a son searches for his mother into a metaphorical plane, where the figure of the blood parent was replaced by the motherland – Kalmykia with all its genetic memory.

IN “Panic attacks” Ivan Tverdovsky also uses the symbolic link “mother/homeland”. Only here the main character Vika (Lena Tronina) from the depressive industrial village of Nikel near Murmansk seeks to break ties with both at any cost. Having received a Schengen visa, she intends to stay forever in Norway, where her older sister (Daria Savelyeva) has already settled. Vika runs away from the house where her mother (Svetlana Kamynina) tried to lock her, offended by her daughters for abandoning her, and hits the road with the Gazelle truck driver Nikita (Sergei Dvoinikov, awarded for best actor). On the way, they stop at the Kola superdeep well, where, according to Nikita, you can make a deal with the devil by shouting your desires to him deep into the earth. And Vika’s dream will indeed come true – only others will have to pay a terrible price for it.

“Panic Attacks” is perhaps the most hopeless, but also the most professionally shot film in the Winter program. The creators masterfully work with image and sound, creating a gloomy, oppressive feeling, so that the audience almost begins to panic in the confined space of the frame along with Vika.

The heroines of Ilya Mikheev’s film also panic and suffocate. “110”, which received well-deserved prizes for best visual design and best actress (for Polina Tsyganova). The title of the tape is the number of the article of the Criminal Code that provides for liability for incitement to suicide. A student from the “Lyceum of High Arts” in St. Petersburg committed suicide, but both her classmates and teachers remain silent about what caused it, hoping that the “incident” will quickly be forgotten. Only one of the classmates, Alisa (Tsyganova), does not want to participate in this mutual responsibility, while physically falling silent – whether this is a protest or a psychological reaction, the audience is free to decide for themselves. Alice’s mother, a successful lawyer Victoria (Elizaveta Boyarskaya), simultaneously strives to protect her daughter and puts pressure on her, seeking obedience. In addition, she is hired to represent the interests of another student, potentially suspected under that same Article 110. However, in the end there are more people responsible, and adults cope with this burden even worse than teenagers.

If half of the competition films were dedicated to mothers, then others talked about fathers, to whom, it should be noted, the directors and scriptwriters turned out to be much more lenient.

So, in “Timire”, whose director’s award has become a very large and unjustified advance, a boy (Algis Danilov), whose mother has died, is sent to a distant village to his father (Georgy Bessonov), whom he does not even really know. A heavy-drinking electrician is not too happy about the responsibility that has fallen on him – he prefers to spend time with his best friend (Roman Dorofeev) and a bottle. Timir misses his mother, local bullies bully him at school, and he doesn’t even have anyone to talk to. However, as a result of a combination of incredible circumstances, his best friend becomes a ghost (Vladislav Nikanorov), stuck between the earthly and otherworldly worlds and living in a landfill in the forest. With his help, Timir’s father will stop drinking, find a common language with his son, all the hooligans will correct themselves, and there will be a complete happy ending. All this is told and shown in a deliberately naive and not very original language, with the obvious influence of Wes Andersen, whose visual techniques were transferred to the Yakut outback purely mechanically.

Alexandra Lupashina’s film also crowns reconciliation with her father “Dance, herring!”, awarded for best screenplay. Here, however, it happens posthumously: Zhanna (Alexandra Bortich) comes to her hometown to bury her father (Pavel Maykov), who has not communicated with her for twenty years, and before that he abandoned her with her mother, at the same time taking everything valuable from the apartment. While she is rushing around provincial morgues, dad suddenly “comes to life” and starts long conversations with his daughter, as a result of which it turns out that all these years he really loved her, so he must be understood and forgiven. Which is what the heroine does, at the same time finding potential love in the person of her former neighbor boy, now a taxi driver released on parole (Ilya Antonenko). The happy ending comes again, and only other festival winners gloomily remind that forgiving the older generations of all their sins can come back to haunt the younger ones with a real tragedy.