What to watch at the Contemporary Science Film Festival – Weekend – Kommersant
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FUNK, the Contemporary Science Film Festival, has put together a program of auteur docus, intellectual films exploring diverse ways to change and improve the world. Weekend chose nine completely different stories from the program: docudramas, thrillers, visionary essays and musical comedies, but in all these scientific films, the protagonist is not a science, but a person.
“Skin to Skin”
Annabeth Jacobsen
Germany, 2022
The film, subtitled “A Brief Cultural History of Touch,” is a cultural sketch, an exploration of the evolution of gestures and intimacy, especially relevant in pandemic times, when touch and, in general, the presence of another person can be fraught with danger. “Society is over,” says one of the characters in the film, meaning that during the pandemic, society broke up, turned into billions of loners, buried in their gadgets and forgot how to communicate with real people. The film explores different types of touch – dance, sex, and hugging a newborn (previous generations believed that children should not be picked up too often), and even the closeness of the viewer and the work of art. Sometimes it is literal closeness, as in the famous performance by Marina Abramović and Ulay, in which the audience was forced to squeeze between a naked artist and her naked partner. Skin to Skin is more of a touch sketch than a serious study, but there are some very interesting insights and observations here. For example, it turns out that during a pandemic, when you had to touch others less often, people touched themselves more often. Touching movie.
“Karo 11 October”, September 18, 16:30
“16 Ways to Change the World”
FANK Film Laboratory, artistic director Yulia Kiseleva
Russia, 2022
Almanac of 16 short films shot by 16 directors at Skoltech. Films about the study of the Sun or algae, the brain or oil, about prostheses and drones – each director could choose what interested him, and the result was a collection not only about Skolkovo developments, but also about how directors choose their heroes. The most interesting thing in the almanac is the appearance on the screen of the authors themselves, who, before each film, tell something about themselves, about their topic or about cinema in general. Arthur Sukhonin loves drones, Elena Demidova sees the whole world, the whole cosmos in “some unfortunate algae”, for Olga Domovtseva “science, physics are emotions”, and Denis Danilov came from feature films and is also trying to find emotion in a puddle of oil. The directors flirt with hydrates and mirrors, quote the Bible and Albert Lamoris’ film “Red Ball”, give the floor to children (“future scientists”), or illustrate carbon nanotubes with drawings of Konstantin Melnikov’s house – in general, they work out the theme “Humanitarian in the temple of science” in a diverse and enthusiastic way. . The sci-fi atmosphere and Skolkovo interiors turn the almanac into a space odyssey, broken into 16 pieces.
“Karo 11 October”, September 20, 19:30 and September 24, 15:00
“Crack the Code”
Safya Kessas
Belgium, 2021
Four portraits of women, a prediction about the future of information technology: today there are only 14% of women in IT, but their number will increase. The Belgian journalist Safia Kessas explores the origins of such discrimination, going through benevolent sexism, gender education, the “impostor syndrome” and stereotypes that “a woman’s place is in the kitchen.” By the way, from a historical digression, you can learn that programming after the Second World War was considered something like cooking: “you just had to perform some actions step by step, and this is like following a recipe – the right job for a woman.” Then men forced women out of the IT field, it was believed that women did not understand anything in technology and engineering, and “Crack the Code” explains what problems this led to and can still lead to. He explains in detail and with cartoons, like in kindergarten, but it seems that Kessas believes that otherwise the testosterone society will not understand anything about women. Kessas names Agnès Varda and Raymond Depardon as his favorite directors and, like them, tries to approach his heroines with respect. She filmed migrant women (Danielle’s Choice), a former jihadist (The Price of Stupidity), now IT women, and watches how her heroines change the world by the very fact of their existence.
“Karo 11 October”, September 16, 19:00
“Illusion”, September 28, 18:00
“At the School of Philosophers”
Fernand Melgar
Switzerland, 2018
An amazing silent thriller about a team of superheroes – five children with mental disabilities who entered a special school on Philosophers Street. Some of them cannot even get up from a wheelchair, some suffer from a mitochondrial disease, almost all of them have extremely unfavorable prognosis. But they all gradually learn to interact with each other, with teachers and listen to themselves. The Swiss Fernand Melgar has already explored the system of modern education in his long-standing film The Reception Class, about children from families of refugees and seasonal workers: teenagers entered a special French class to fit into a new life. Himself from a family of immigrants, Melgar in his films explores primarily strangers, those who are forced to interact with an alien system – but also those who help them in this, as, for example, in the film “Fortress”, about the Swiss refugee filtering center ( “Golden Leopard” at the festival in Locarno-2008). In the film “At the School of Philosophers” he adheres to the same principle, the heroes are all here: teachers, children, and parents. The task of the director, in his own words, is to show that education is the only way to create a better world.
“Karo 11 October”, September 17, 18:00 and September 25, 17:30
“Burnout”
Jérôme le Mer
Belgium, France, 2016
A drama from the life of one hospital – but in fact from the life of the entire healthcare system. In the hospital, operation after operation goes on, doctors do everything automatically: wash their hands, put on a gown, inject anesthesia, cut, stitch, take off the gown, throw it into a pile of other gowns. Dozens of surgeries a day, overload, budget cuts, the demand for ever greater efficiency, the optimization of medicine – doctors are turning into robots, but robots are on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “I no longer work for pleasure,” the doctor says to the camera, “if I won the lottery, I would quit my job immediately.” The anesthesiologist holds back tears: “My work no longer makes sense. I qualify, but it doesn’t make sense anymore.” The film is about how to find meaning again: you just need to remember that the organization consists of people. Burnout is “the pathology of our civilization,” says French director Jérôme le Mer. He watched the hospital routine for a year and a half and searched for his heroes, then for a year he made a film – he wanted to see how this closed system evolves. Cinema from distant pre-covid times.
“Pioneer”, September 24, 19:05
“Illusion”, September 25, 19:30
“Pioneers of Plastic”
Mike Wafer
UK, 2021
It could be a horror about how plastic affects people and animals, and the film actually starts with apocalyptic images of a littered world. Plastic cups lying on the street are filmed as if they are about to pack in a flock and attack people. Birds die when they swallow a piece of plastic, corals get sick when they touch plastic, and only people continue to wallow on the beach among tens of thousands of plastic cups and empty bottles. Plastic Pioneers is an organization trying to solve the problem of environmental pollution, to cope with the global crisis, until it coped with humanity. The best episode of the film is the sane, smart and sensible children who talk about how we should live on. By the end, it becomes clear that this is not a horror, but a manifesto: let’s get together in a flock and do something useful for humanity. Director Mike Wafer has filmed for the BBC, National Geographic and Discovery, and first encountered the problem of plastic when he was working on a film about polar bears: he was amazed that plastic had even reached the desert lands.
“Illusion”, September 25, 17:15
“Karo 11 October”, September 30, 20:00
“King of the Hill”
Masha Lind, Daria Khrenova
Russia, 2022
A film about mad scientists, peppy musicians and evil plastic. The idea is about the same as that of the “Pioneers of Plastic”: garbage tests humanity for strength – but the genre is completely different. This is a musical situation comedy, a life-affirming story about the transformation of garbage: plastic turns into art, sound, food for larvae. The “Ecology of Thought” group plays on garbage – it extracts sounds from plastic slippers, hoses from a washing machine, buckets, sewer pipes. A scientist from Yakutsk breeds plastic-eating larvae and dreams of creating a substance “like the blood of an Alien in the movie: pop it – and the plastic dissolves.” Someone makes furniture from recycled plastic that glows in the dark, someone lives in cities from garbage. True, there are those who say that this is a disastrous path: if you continue to look for ways to recycle plastic, you may get the feeling that plastic is normal and you can continue to produce it. The role of a kind of chorus is played by the Soviet chronicle, which tells that plastic is amazingly durable. Daria Khrenova (“Pavlensky. Naked Life”, “Country of Bears”) and Masha Lind (“I Believe, I Believe”, “Make it to 30”) made the most fun film of the program.
“Karo 11 October”, September 29, 20:00
“Pleistocene Park”
Luke Griswold-Tergis
USA, 2022
The stubborn, middle-aged geophysicist Sergei Zimov, a “pathological optimist” by director Luke Griswold-Tergis, decided to revive the mammoth steppe of the Ice Age in Siberia, to create a Pleistocene park with tens of millions of large herbivores – bison, deer, horses, sheep. According to him, this park will not only become the “new Serengeti”, but can also slow down the thawing of permafrost and ultimately save humanity. Zimov’s character, to be honest, is not very good. Animals, bureaucrats and nature itself do not support his ideas. But the son, Nikita, supports him – he treats his father with respect, but not without irony. Mosquitoes itch. The ice is melting. Buying bison is not so easy. This film is something like Jurassic Park in pre-release, a drama about the relationship of father and son against the backdrop of chewing horses, a powerful story about a possible/impossible future. “If people remain as stupid, our chances of survival will be very small,” Sergei says in broken English, but the viewer understands everything.
“Illusion”, September 17, 13:00
“Pioneer”, September 23, 19:05
“Karo 11 October”, September 24, 18:00
“Roberto Assagioli, explorer of the spirit”
Fernando Maragini, Maria Erica Pacileo
Italy, 2017
A biographical sketch about the Italian psychiatrist, the founding father of psychosynthesis, Roberto Assagioli, is nothing like a portrait film. Rather, it is an impressionistic essay, a meditation, reflections on the life of the spirit. His students and followers, psychoanalysts and theosophists, tell about the life and ideas of Assagioli. Psychosynthesis can be described in three words: “cognition, growth, personal transformation”: Assagioli, who studied the practices of personal growth and turned them into a therapeutic process of healing and self-learning, appears in the film as a being both supermundane and very earthly. Fernando Maragini and Maria Erica Pacileo made their documentary debut with episodes that can be called reconstructions, but in these episodes it is not the events that are reconstructed, but the atmosphere, so that the whole film turns into a big Italian journey: sometimes through the Venetian canals and rainy squares (Assagioli was born in Venice ), then along the Tiber (he lived with his family in Rome), then along the Alps, where he was hiding from the Nazis. Few things can tell as much about the life of the spirit as Italian landscapes.
“Karo 11 October”, September 18, 14:30
“Illusion”, September 26, 18:30
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