The Open Russian Film Festival of Auteur Cinema “Winter” has begun in Moscow.

The Open Russian Film Festival of auteur cinema “Winter” has begun in Moscow, which is being held for the second time this year. Its competition program included eight films, which will be evaluated by a jury chaired by producer Sofia Mitrofanova until December 7. Talks about the first festival screenings Julia Shagelman.

“Winter”, organized by producers Natalya Mokritskaya (she is also the festival’s program director) and Maxim Korolev, was held for the first time last year and was considered so successful that the Ministry of Culture allocated funds for its continuation. At the opening of the second festival, Minister of Culture Olga Lyubimova praised the organizers for making this festival “as if it were already the twenty-third, as if it had always been,” and emphasized that filmmakers now have the opportunity to end another “such a difficult year” with a sort of summing-up film screening. The organizers, in turn, thanked the minister, and for some reason not the directors and producers, for the opportunity to collect a sufficient number of films for the Winter program.

Ms. Mokritskaya said her main goal is to attract attention to auteur cinema, although the MIFF, Window to Europe, the One Sixth debut festival in Yekaterinburg, and the In Short festival, which this year have competition of full-length films, and “Mayak”, held for the first time in October this year in Gelendzhik. Nevertheless, in the Winter competition, a little more laconic than last year, this time there are only premieres. These are the films “110” by Ilya Mikheev, “White Road!” Ella Manzheeva, “Faith” by Ira Volkova, “Panic Attacks” by Ivan I. Tverdovsky, “We’ll Go with You to Macau” by Roman Mikhailov, “Headbreaking” by Evgeny Grigoriev, “Dance, Herring!” Alexandra Lupashko and “Timir” by Nikolai Koryakin.

The opening film of “Winter” was the documentary “The Architect: The Story of Alexey German and His Films,” presented by Alexey German Jr. Before its screening at the Message to Man festival in October, it turned out that its director and screenwriter was film critic Anton Dolin (recognized as a foreign agent in the Russian Federation), whose name is now not indicated anywhere, and the voice-over text he read was re-voiced by German Jr. He was not mentioned on the stage of “Winter”, except that Mr. German, speaking about the numerous difficulties in working on the picture, vaguely hinted that “injustice” had been added to them “lately.” “But let’s not talk about them, let’s forget about them,” he summed up his opening speech.

This is all the more paradoxical since the film itself, which tells about the creative path of Herman Sr. through the prism of his last, most monumental work, “It’s Hard to Be a God,” naturally mentions both the director’s problems with Soviet censorship and how his first the independent film “Road Check” was banned for many years. The cameraman Yuri Klimenko, costume designer Ekaterina Shapkaits, who played the main role in “Hard to Be a God,” Leonid Yarmolnik, and film critic and film historian Naum Kleiman speak about German’s uncompromising honesty, both in cinema and in life. They come to the conclusion that Herman has always filmed about how to remain human in the darkest and most inhumane times, and, as can be seen from the example of the documentary itself, this question still remains relevant.

The competitive screenings were opened by the film “The White Road!” Ella Manzheeva is her second film, and work on it took almost ten years. The story of a rapper (Timur Bubeev), who went to the Kalmyk steppe in search of his missing mother (Lyubov Ubushieva), and who, it seems, was lost there forever, is, of course, not an everyday sketch, but a large-scale canvas with ethnographic and philosophical overtones about the loss and acquisition of a national identity. References to the Kalmyk epic, long shots of endless steppes, songs and customs that the authors deliberately do not decipher – all this is initially captivating and hypnotizing. But from about the middle, the film begins to sag under the weight of the numerous themes that the director seeks to address. There are family relationships, xenophobia, sexual violence, and inescapable generational trauma associated with the deportation of Kalmyks in the 1940s. All topics are important, all sensitive, and all prevent each other from revealing themselves, remaining a set of ticked boxes on an imaginary list. As a result, the film loses its emotional connection with the viewer and becomes somehow even deliberately “festival-like.”