The 33rd film festival “Message to Man” ended in St. Petersburg

The 33rd International Film Festival “Message to Man” completed its work in St. Petersburg. The jury of the international competition chose the short fiction film “Will my parents come to see me?” as his best film. Mo Harave. The main award of the national competition went to the documentary film “Suggested Circumstances” by Nikita Efimov. Talks about the winners of the festival Julia Shagelman.

Director Mo Harawe was born in Mogadishu (Somalia), but has lived in Austria since 2009. Filmed in Somali, “Will My Parents Come to See Me?” is his fourth short film, which has already participated in several international festivals. It shows the last day of a man sentenced to execution – with bureaucratic checks, medical procedures, the last visit of the imam (the “good news” is that, starting this year, the condemned are allowed to pray), the last exchange of questions and answers between the prisoner and his guard. Through these routine gears of the state mechanism, making habitual, practiced movements, in 28 minutes a picture of a man’s terrible tryst with his fate emerges.

The special international jury prize for best director was awarded to Vladimir Eisner for the film “Twilight,” a documentary triptych about the life of the Russian province, consisting of fragments filmed over different years. The hero of the first, black and white part from 2000 is a veteran of the Great Patriotic War, who became a pickpocket, who talks about himself against the background of news chronicles and political news of the turbulent beginning of the new millennium. In the second, filmed in 2013, the main character is a local police officer, forced day after day to deal with the population of a dying village drinking and beating each other. In the third part, dated 2023, milkmaids drive cows to slaughter to the music of Purcell and excerpts of the Old Testament story about the Flood playing from the radio. All this, obviously, should reflect the inescapable Russian melancholy, which the author looks down on somewhat, but still has difficulty putting together into one whole.

In “Suggested Circumstances,” on the contrary, the distance between the director—a graduate of Marina Razbezhkina’s workshop—and his subject is reduced as much as possible. Nikita Efimov is filming the Sovremennik Theater after the appointment of a new artistic director, Viktor Ryzhakov, at the beginning of 2020. In addition to the a priori hostility of the troupe, with which he is trying to stage a play by a modern author, overcoming the whims of the stars, the actor’s nerves, his own uncertainty, the lack of established communication between the participants in the process, the pandemic also becomes the “proposed circumstances”. We have to rehearse over Zoom, and during personal meetings, masks become an additional barrier. The sudden ending to this story is again given by life itself: before Ryzhakov finally has time to establish contact with the team and in the throes of giving birth to a performance, in 2022 he, along with the heads of several other Moscow theaters, is fired, putting a faceless “arts council” in charge of Sovremennik. The very recording of these “circumstances” now requires a certain courage, but Efimov also fills them with real life, clearly capturing the spirit of the times.

The press jury prize went to American Penny Lane’s film “Confessions of a Good Samaritan” from the “Panorama.doc” program. Lane’s paintings tend to be distinguished by their unconventional approach to unconventional subjects: for example, in “Madness!” (2016) tells the story of the eccentric doctor John Romulus Brinkley, who invented a cure for impotence using an extract of goat testicles, and in “In Praise of Darkness?” — about the scandalous religious organization “Temple of Satan,” which not so much worships the devil as trolls representatives of official churches and religions. In Confessions of a Good Samaritan, Lane decides to make a radical gesture not only for a filmmaker, but also for just an ordinary person: she herself becomes the heroine of her own film, deciding to donate her kidney to a stranger in need of a transplant. This opens up space for conversation not only about “altruistic donation,” as the phenomenon is called, but also about the nature of altruism and empathy in general. Lane reveals a complex and controversial topic with sincerity, humor and high professionalism, but at the same time without a shadow of moralizing, allowing the audience to come to their own conclusions – and, perhaps, do some good deed upon leaving the cinema, albeit not so much decisive.

“Message to Man”, founded in 1988, remains, perhaps, the main – if not the only – festival platform for documentary and experimental films in Russia, with an international program and demonstration of sometimes very free, both in form and in content, author’s works. films. True, this did not happen without the characteristic scandals of our time. For example, at the festival there was a screening of the film “The Architect: The Story of Alexei German and His Films,” from which the name of its screenwriter and director Anton Dolin (recognized as a foreign agent), as well as his voice-over, completely disappeared. The cinematic community started talking about his participation in the film only after a post on the Telegram channel of film critic Zinaida Pronchenko. The film’s producers explained all the changes as “working issues,” and heated discussions on social networks did not hinder its future festival fate at all – on December 1, the film will open the Winter Festival in Moscow. These are the proposed circumstances in which any message to a person is now spoken.