Film replacement – Newspaper Kommersant No. 177 (7378) dated 09/26/2022

Last week, the Rosa Khutor ski resort hosted the first New Season festival of online platforms. Some simple-hearted people directly spoke about him: “Instead of” Kinotavr “”. Those who are more polite did not say this out loud, but thought.

It is worth remembering: back on February 22, the press service of Kinotavr, the main Russian film festival owned by producer Alexander Rodnyansky, announced that it would be held on September 13-20. But a couple of days later, Mr. Rodnyansky began to speak not about cinema at all. Being a largely independent person, he soon continued to do this from abroad. Of course, there could be no more talk of any Kinotavr. But there were rumors that the Ministry of Culture is very interested in having at least some major festival of Russian cinema after all. The Vyborg review “Window to Europe” (in August it was held for the 30th time) no one wanted to designate as such. Either because of the name, or because of the need to ennoble the whole of Vyborg (in the selection of the “Top Ten Hotels in Vyborg”, the Tripadvisor resource offers Finnish hotels located a few tens of kilometers away).

Then in July it became known about a completely new festival “New Season”. It was promised to be held on September 18–23 in the suburbs of Sochi with Polina Zueva as producer and director (she has also been the producer of Kinotavr since 2005). It seems that there was no one who believed in the sincerity of the sudden impulse of online platforms to unite with the support of the Ministry of Culture in order to hold a review of their serial and full-length products. In general, I went to the “New Season” with skepticism in hand luggage. And I got to the middle of the festival – on the day when “partial mobilization” was announced. The party of the Start online cinema in honor of its fifth anniversary with a concert by Leonid Agutin has already died down, the sky over the ski resort has become impenetrable and hopelessly gray. There was also a chamber party for only 100 people called Kinopoisk at the gastropub Chukotka. There was also a breakfast for Action charitable organization Svetlana Bondarchuk and Yevgenia Popova – previously, at Kinotavr, Mrs. Bondarchuk always hosted Hello! In the new circumstances, when the magazine is headed by Olga Rodionova, but Kinotavr is no more, the habit has remained. So the guests were shown the best short films of the past years, sold at the New Year’s Eve Action charity auctions.

Another example of attachment to a personal past was demonstrated by Igor Mishin. For the previous couple of years, he made it so that guests and participants of Kinotavr went beyond the Dionis cafe (in Rosa Khutor, Zarkov’s Red Fox became the main restaurant point), arranged a rave party in Mamai-Kale, where the DJ myself. This time Shining Emptiness 3.0 invited guests to the Skypark entertainment complex. At the beginning of his own set, Mr. Mishin turned on a fragment of Swan Lake. At the closing ceremony, he seemed to be the only one of the members of the board of trustees who tried to speak out: “I would like the New Season to keep two values ​​- common sense and hope.” Strictly speaking, he said exactly the same thing at the opening. But it’s true, during the festival the need for common sense and hope has only become more acute.

Already after the closing of the New Season, at the Okko party with the concert of the Zveri group, I asked the head of the Board of Trustees of the festival, Eduard Iloyan, how the New Season appeared, why it was done so hastily and why it was Polina Zueva who did it. “Actually, the festival was supposed to take place in June in Gelendzhik, but they closed the sky,” Mr. Iloyan replied. “And after that, we decided that it would be logical to hold it at the beginning of the premiere season. And we immediately turned to Polina with the question of whether she would be able to make two festivals: ours in June and Kinotavr in September. We decided there was no conflict of interest.” And it really didn’t happen.

Evgenia Milova, columnist for Kommersant