The Mayak film festival, organized by Abramovich’s Kinoprime Foundation, starts in Gelendzhik

On October 5, a new film festival “Mayak”, organized by Roman Abramovich’s Kinoprime Foundation, starts in Gelendzhik. The organizers themselves call it “a festival of contemporary Russian cinema,” and their intentions are to set goals for filmmakers and prospects for the development of an industry that is going through yet another difficult time. The program of the show, which will last until October 9, includes a competition of full-length feature films and a series of business events. Comments Julia Shagelman.

The Kinoprime Foundation, which has been supporting auteur cinema since 2019, announced the launch of the festival in July of this year. It is assumed that the show will be held annually, although the organizers carefully call its current edition a “pilot”. Its producer was the executive director of Kinoprime Anton Malyshev, the program director was film critic and curator of the Khudozhestvenny cinema Stas Tyrkin, and the director of industry relations at Yandex, Ksenia Boletskaya, was responsible for the business program. The event was financed exclusively by private money from the foundation and its partners, without government participation.

The festival’s competition program included eleven films: the opening film “Year of Birth” by Mikhail Mestetsky, “Long Dates” by Georgy Lyalin, “Vacation” by Anna Kuznetsova, “Contacts” by feature debutant Dmitry Moiseev, “New Berlin” by Alexey Fedorchenko, “Kingdom” Tatyana Rakhmanova, “My Invisible” by Anton Bilzho, “Red” by Semyon Serzin, “Frau” – the second directorial work of screenwriter Lyubov Mulmenko, “Era” by Veniamin Ilyasov and “The Plague” by Dmitry Davydov, which occupies the niche of the Yakut film that is obligatory for Russian festivals in recent years ( in 2020, it was this director who consolidated this tradition by becoming the winner of Kinotavr with the film Scarecrow).

To a first approximation, these films cover a range of topics familiar to the domestic art mainstream: generational conflict, single-parent families, toxic gender relations, bizarre provincial life (“Contacts,” for example, promise some kind of wild fantasy in the outback), echoes of the 1990s and spiritual tossing. The jury headed by producer Igor Tolstunov will choose which director expressed them better than others. It also included film artist Nadezhda Vasilyeva-Balabanova, film critic and producer Lev Karakhan, actor, director and producer Danila Kozlovsky, director and screenwriter Alexey Popogrebsky and actress Anya Chipovskaya.

Mayak will be the second Russian film festival to appear in the last two years. In December 2022, the Winter Festival, organized by producer Natalya Mokritskaya and receiving government support, was held in Moscow, which will take place this year. Other changes have appeared on the festival map: for example, the Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) has allocated a separate “Russian Premieres” program for domestic films from 2022; the debut festival “One Sixth” has opened in Yekaterinburg, in which Russian and foreign films, both fiction and documentaries, participate; The short film festival “Koroche”, which has been held in Kaliningrad since 2013, this summer for the first time included a competitive program of feature-length debuts, curated by Sitora Aliyeva, the former program director of Kinotavr. Also, since 2022, at the Rosa Khutor resort, that is, very close to Sochi, which is prayed for by Kinotavr, the online cinema festival “New Season” is taking place, presenting new serials, co-founded, produced and directed by former Kinotavr producer Polina Zueva .

The repeated mention of the show, which was headed by Alexander Rodnyansky, now recognized as a foreign agent, and which ceased to exist in 2022, is not accidental. All this festival activity, despite the fact that the organizers of both “Winter” and “Mayak” emphasize that they do not strive (and could not, even if they wanted) to replace “Kinotavr”, in reality, of course, one way or another fills the niche they left. At the same time, they, along with other festivals, for example the Vyborg “Window to Europe”, have to share directors, actors, producers and industry experts who used to gather in one place and, if not define, then at least record the main trends in the development of domestic auteur cinema.

The Mayak team obviously has the necessary flair and expertise to put together a truly interesting program. But the status of a major or even simply significant national festival takes years to develop—it took Kinotavr about thirty years to achieve this. In addition, the socio-political context is changing so rapidly that the relevance stated in the title of “The Lighthouse” will be quite difficult to keep up with. Independent financial support without the participation of the state, of course, provides the new show with a certain freedom of maneuver – but, I think, both its organizers and other participants in the film industry understand that now the independence of any cultural institutions in Russia can only be very conditional.