The international film festival “Message to Man” is taking place in St. Petersburg

The international film festival “Message to Man” is taking place in St. Petersburg, which is being held for the 33rd time this year. Its competitive and non-competitive programs included 189 documentaries, feature films, animated films, as well as experimental films combining all these techniques. I noticed a movie that talks about how movies are made. Julia Shagelman.

“Message to Man” opened with Michel Gondry’s film “The Book of Decisions,” which participated in this year’s Cannes Film Festival and will be released in Russian theaters on November 16. The director, who won the hearts of film critics and film fans with the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004), has not directed a full-length film since 2015, making his way through music videos, short films and work on the series “Kidding” (2018–2020) about a depressed comedian. “The Book of Resolutions” is a kind of self-therapy session and a confession of what caused this break.

Marc (Pierre Ninet), Gondry’s obvious alter ego, is a talented but completely incapable of concentrating director who can’t finish his new film. When the producers decide to give the film to someone else for final editing, he runs away with the footage and his team to his aunt’s village, where he vows to finish the film. But instead he does anything else, drawing cartoons, composing music, acting as the village mayor, or coming up with ways to save the world, which he writes down in a special book. All this, as often with Gondry, in some places resembles the program “Crazy Hands”, in some places it makes you laugh, in others it irritates. In the end, Mark’s film is miraculously finished, but there is still no certainty that his prototype has emerged from a protracted crisis.

If “The Book of Decisions” talks about lack of self-confidence and in one’s business, then Amin Mestari’s film “Michael Douglas, Prodigy” from the “Panorama.doc” program, collected by Alexei Medvedev and Natalya Pylaeva, is about overcoming complexes and finding one’s own voice. Essentially, this is an hour-long interview with Michael Douglas – about his relationship with his father, a superstar and a difficult person in family life, his career and the struggle with addictions and illnesses. As befits a Hollywood story, this is a success story. Having started his path both in life and in profession as “the son of Kirk Douglas,” Michael managed to separate himself from his father and even surpass him, if the Oscar award is considered a formal criterion: the younger Douglas received two, as a producer and as an actor, and the elder Douglas received two Three nominations and an honorary award based on total merit remained. Nevertheless, even through Michael’s professional charm and his ability to charismatically tell stories, genuine emotions still break through, sometimes associated with regrets and disappointments.

The “Workshop” program by Pyotr Shepotinnik is entirely dedicated to the history of cinema and the people who make it. It included films by Italian director Mario Canale about his great compatriots Marco Ferreri, Gillo Pontecorvo, Vittorio De Sica and the Taviani brothers. And also the film by the Swiss Roman Huben “Douglas Sirk. Hope as Despair” is about the American director, whose 1950s salon melodramas are almost forgotten by the general public, but had a profound influence on Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Francois Ozon, Pedro Almodóvar, Todd Haynes and many others.

Like the film about Michael Douglas, Huben’s film is very traditional in form – it consists mainly of interviews with talking heads (including Haynes and Fassbinder’s favorite actress Hanna Schygulla, who managed to meet Sirk), film fragments and chronicles. But the biography of the director, who was born in Germany (his real name is Detlief Sierck) and fled to the United States from the Nazi regime in the 1930s to save his second Jewish wife, is amazing. In his decorative films, with their exaggerated passions, one often feels hidden pain and a sense of powerlessness in the face of social evil. Huben and other researchers find the roots of this in the life of Sirk, whose first wife, who became a convinced Nazi, forbade him to communicate with their son, whom his father could only see as an actor in propaganda films and finally lost when he died at the front at the age of 19. This story is still relevant now, when ideological and real wars continue to separate families and ruin destinies.

But Fassbinder, who appears in the film on archival footage, says Sirk’s films were made by a man who loved people, despite all the losses and betrayals he experienced. Creativity as a way to treat mental pain may be precisely the message to people that the festival organizers would like to convey.