Sokurov opened the festival in the port of St. Petersburg

A new International Film Festival “An Example of Intonation” has opened in St. Petersburg. Alexander Sokurov became his inspiration. Shows are held in Sevkabel Porto in the area of ​​cable packaging – it sounds quite extreme.

“An example of intonation” is the name of a documentary film shot by Sokurov back in 1991 about Boris Yeltsin. This combination of words later began to accompany the director’s multifaceted activities, including pedagogical ones.

Now, at the festival with this name, Alexander Sokurov’s painting “Fairy Tale” is shown, created in co-production with Belgium, but without Russian funding. It has long been released in Japan and Portugal, a number of other European countries, was shown at the Rotterdam and Tokyo film festivals, in Swiss Locarno, Turin, and South Korea.

In Russia, there were several closed screenings for a narrow circle, in particular, at Lenfilm for graduates of Sokurov’s St. Petersburg workshop – the second after his famous course in Kabardino-Balkaria.

The film tells about the events of World War II, and its heroes are the shadows, the dead of great history – Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Churchill. They will meet in a certain purgatory where they have a chance to talk. The film starred exclusively foreign artists. Participates in the festival and the picture of 2016 “Go. go. Go”, which few people have seen. This is a video version of the play staged by Sokurov in Vicenza based on the works of Brodsky.

The main program presents very fresh pictures. Many of them will be shown here for the first time. The directors will personally present their work. Alexander Sokurov will also do this, setting an example of intonation for this film review. The works of the Kabardino-Balkarian workshop of the director are also presented – “The cage is looking for a bird” by Malika Musaeva, who specially came from Germany, where her family has long lived, “Knots” by Oleg Khamokov, one of the few who stayed in Nalchik, having received a director’s profession. He will also come to the showing of his painting.

Experienced directors and even masters include Boris Khlebnikov with Snegir and Natalia Meshchaninova, whose One Little Night Secret was shown for the first time at the Rotterdam Film Festival.

The new work will be presented by the St. Petersburg writer, mathematician and director Roman Mikhailov, known for the film “A Tale for the Old”. It would seem that his premiere “Snow, Sister and Wolverine” has just passed, and now a new film – “Legacy” about the life of provincial teenagers.

Actress Alisa Khazanova seriously took up directing and has already made the second picture after “Shards” – “White List”. It is about the suicide of a schoolgirl, which the whole country learned about after being published in a newspaper. The role of the investigator was played by Alexei Serebryakov.

Another debutant, Anton Eliseev, filmed Russian Dreams in Yekaterinburg with the participation of non-professional actors and artists from the Kolyada Theater Tamara Zimina and Oleg Yagodin. The protagonist is a teenager who came to the village to visit his grandmother after the death of his mother. Still quite young people fell into the zone of increased directorial attention, including Khlebnikov and Meshchaninova.

Among overseas curiosities, and now this is the only way to call our rare foreign films of the festival test (some of them, however, did not get there), – “My Crime” by Francois Ozon, “Copenhagen Does Not Exist” by Martin Skovbjerg, “House of Pleasures” Frenchwoman Anissa Bonnfon on a writer interested in the experience of sex workers, Gods of Mexico by Helmut Dosantos about indigenous African peoples living in Latin America, and Ron Chapman’s documentary Revival 69: The Legend Returns about a Toronto music festival where John appeared Lennon, who not only blew up the hall of many thousands, but also made a fateful decision.

These days they show not only feature films, but short films – documentaries and feature films made in the St. Petersburg workshop of Alexander Sokurov and other film schools. The poet Galina Rymbu and St. Petersburg debutant Alisa Erokhina, who made the film “On the Eve”, became participants in the laboratories.

The organizers are ambitiously positioning the festival as the main film event of this summer. Let’s see if it will become such – there is little time for proof – only four days.