What to watch at the KARO.Art festival – Weekend
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From October 10 to 15, the Karo 11 October cinema will host the Second International Festival “KARO.Art”, which, in terms of the number and quality of premiere screenings, claims to become the main metropolitan show of the year (part of the program will be echoed in other cities of Russia) . The opening film will be “Chimera” by Aliche Rohrwacker, and the closing film will feature the first Moscow screening of “Fairy Tales” by Alexander Sokurov. We talk about the most interesting premieres of the festival.
“Kretsul”
Alexandra Likhacheva, 2023
Chisinau, 1997. Champion judoka Oleg Kretsul (Nikita Volkov) gets into an accident in which he loses his wife and goes blind. His sidekick Vitalik (Sergei Volkov) comes to the rescue, gathering his will and all his belongings into one fist and starting to train his friend for the Paralympic Games. This is a real story: Oleg Kretsul became a multiple champion, and his friend Vitaly Gligor is still his coach (he also co-wrote the film script). Another thing is surprising about “Kretsul” – least of all, this laconic movie, like its heroes, looks like a typical sports drama. And it’s not just that he does without editing training. A graduate of Alexey Uchitel’s workshop, Alexandra Likhachev, for her feature-length debut, takes the excellent cinematographer Marius Pandura, famous for his work with the Romanian new wave, and, moving by touch, crashing into the backs of heads and freezing at turns, sneaks along the well-worn track of dramas about the strength of spirit and strong male friendship , noticing the strange and not missing the main thing.
“Seize the Night”
Prokopiy Burtsev, 2023
A man (Dmitry Trofimov), returning home from work, receives a call from a stranger: his wife has been kidnapped, and in order to save her, he needs to complete several tasks. In one night in winter Yakutsk, he will survive “12 Rounds,” “Accomplice,” and “Saw.” At first, “Catch the Night” seems to be just an example of dashing trash cinema, cheap, angry and homemade even by the standards of partisan Yakut cinema. But the voluntary outsider Burtsev, the author of the cult “Ferrum” (2015), living in cinematic seclusion, holds in his pocket not even a fig, but a sharply sharpened knife, with which he rips open both genre expectations and the viewer’s critical apparatus. A short, snappy and stunning movie that you’ll want to think about for a long time.
“Light”
Anton Kolomeets, 2022
Social worker Tatyana (Elena Yakovleva) is preparing to celebrate her sixtieth birthday, but her head is occupied with something completely different. No, it’s not a matter of a visit from my son, who comes infrequently and for short periods of time, but knows how to resolve a conflict in five minutes. And not at work: the old people she needed to look after always needed help. And the son is good, and the work is beloved, but moments of early youth persistently emerge in memory with songs with a guitar, passionate confessions, “Romance of Lovers,” hopes and the first wounds of the heart. What is this? Light nostalgia for the long past or an attempt to comprehend the trauma after which life took a wrong turn? The film, which became a triumph at the last Window to Europe festival, honestly keeps the intrigue until the very end, but that is not the whole point of this sensitive and fragile picture. Elena Yakovleva, who plays the main role, not only carries the entire “Light” on herself, but endows it with some properties that cannot be retold. When talking about such acting work, the adjective “phenomenal” is usually used, and here it does not seem like a stretch or an exaggeration.
DVA
Alexandra Karelina, 2022
People scattered across the earth, a state of emergency in Moscow, a ban on the word “death” – no, this is not a news feed, but an experimental film by music video director and video artist Alexandra Karelina, conceived in 2021, completed in 2022 and shown at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2023 -m. For all its dark associations, this movie avoids straightforward generalizations and dispenses with any strict narrative at all. Shot on 16 mm film, the film refers to the American avant-garde of the middle of the last century (with associative editing, catchy visual imagery, diary style), but was made according to the laws of today’s time: with a clip rhythm, deliberate retro, crazy sound design. This is a movie that needs to be watched on the big screen. It will be very scary.
“Valley of Abraham”
Manuel di Oliveira, 1993
If cinema existed in the mid-19th century, it would have looked something like the masterpiece of the Portuguese classic, then 85-year-old Manuel de Oliveira. The Valley of Abraham (1993) is one of the most literary-centric films in the history of cinema. Based, like many of the director’s other films, on the novel of the same name by Agustina Bessa-Luis, it is structured according to the laws of literary rather than conventional cinematic dramaturgy. The voice of a not-so-reliable narrator comments on almost every scene in the story of one unhappy marriage and one beautiful woman taking one lover after another. Of course, this is both Madame Bovary (the book even appears in the frame) and the complete opposite of the immortal novel. Flaubert understood everything about his heroine and took her apart piece by piece, but for Oliveira she becomes more and more mysterious with each new scene. “The Valley of Abraham” will be shown in a fresh restoration, which cannot be found online.
“Scarlet”
Pietro Marcello, 2022
Beginning of the 20th century. Carpenter Raphael (Raphael Thierry) returns from the First World War to his native place, where the lonely landowner Adeline (Noemie Lvovsky), daughter Juliette and the grave of his wife Maria are waiting for him. Having fallen from the hell of the army into everyday hopelessness, the newly minted veteran widower does not give up – especially since he has golden hands: Raphael takes on any woodwork and quickly gains respect at the local shipyard. True, he just as quickly becomes an outcast due to accusations of the death of a local innkeeper. Juliette (Juliette Juan), meanwhile, grows up, showing a keen interest in nature, poetry, music, carpentry and a little in miracles: a nearby witch (Yolanda Moreau) promises her scarlet sails on the horizon. The favorite of cinephiles, Pietro Marcello, who conquered Venice four years ago with “Martin Eden,” took on Alexander Green’s free adaptation, setting the plot in the 1920s, when the novel was written. Raphael appears to the viewer as if from a painted chronicle of the post-war years (the director actually uses it instead of urban general plans), the picturesque outback in every sense contrasts with his drama and everyday life, and to the expressive faces for which Marcello has a trained eye are not added the less expressive palms of the carpenter, as if they had absorbed every wrinkle of the era. Likewise, the dreaminess in “Scarlet” is not defenseless, but down-to-earth: Juliette does not allow herself to be offended, showing independence and character, and the romantic pilot Jean, played by Louis Garrel, embodies not only a happy ending, but also the beginning of a new era: with cinema, airplanes, industrialization – and emancipation too. You shouldn’t wait for scarlet sails: you need to raise them yourself.
“Next Victim”
Jung Joo Ri, 2022
Kim So Hee (Kim Si Eun) is passionate about dancing and shows great promise, but in order to earn a living, she gets an internship at a call center of a large provider. Having said goodbye to her dream of the stage, the girl is faced with numerous tricks from her employer. The company demands inhuman performance, forcing them to put pressure on clients, and they are in no hurry to give bonus payments – especially to interns, who often quit after a few days of hassle (they often call from brawlers and perverts). The global pyramid of labor hopelessness is shown through the eyes of investigator Oh Yu Jin (Bae Doo Na), who was dancing with Kim So Hee. Just as a student doesn’t want to torture people for the sake of earning money, the policewoman allows herself to investigate the chain of fraud for a long time, figuring out how reporting and propaganda of work in families turn the lives of young Koreans into hell. Only the second film by director Jung Joo Ri, who made her debut with the drama “To-hee” with the same Bae Doo-na, turns out to be worse than “The Squid Game”, since there is no relief or winners here.
“Omen”
Baloji, 2023
Coffey (Mark Zinga from Tori and Lokita) and Alice (Lucy Debye) are expecting twins and plan to get married, but first he wants to go to his homeland of the Congo, where he has not been for 18 years. There, the groom wants to give gifts to his parents, according to local custom, and receive a blessing from his strict, superstitious mother Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnakhua). A separate point of his program is a conversation with his father, but the entire odyssey does not go according to plan, turning into a Kafkaesque safari with elements of a mystical trip. In fact, in The Omen, the four main characters are people who are believed to be sorcerers, like Coffey, who was born with a birthmark and suffered from nosebleeds. The other two are his mother and his progressive sister Tchala (Neptune Frost’s Elian Umugire), who is trying an open relationship with her boyfriend. The fourth is street urchin Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya), whose gang wears pink dresses in memory of his dead sister. Belgian debutant of Congolese origin Baloji explores what it is like to be a “sorcerer”, an outsider in such a superstitious and regulated society. If Coffey can return to France at any moment, then his relatives, and especially the orphan Paco, are locked in their assigned roles, ritually and bureaucratically. Baloji’s pulsating film, which moves from cultural identity drama to folk horror to musical to fairy tale like Hansel and Gretel, won the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival the award for “new voice” in cinema.
“Melnikov”
Marina-Maria Melnik, 2023
Docking tour of the Melnikov House Museum, the work of the innovative architect and the Soviet avant-garde of the early 20th century. A film by Marina-Maria Melnik, who had previously made films about artists Egon Schiele (“Egon”) and Dasha Namdakov (“Father Baikal”), as well as about the guru of the directing department of VGIK Vladimir Fenchenko (“Fenchenko. Life is a thrill”), is dedicated to the traces left by the architect, his ideas and buildings in space and time. As expected, the heart of the film becomes the Melnikov House in Krivoarbatsky Lane, which survived the peak of the architect’s career, World War II and a long history with inheritance and restoration in the 2010s. The hexagonal windows of the cylindrical building serve as portals of sorts – into the history of architecture, illustrated with drawings, models and fragments from avant-garde cinema classics, such as “Man with a Movie Camera”; to Melnikov’s library of ideas – again plans and fragments from the memoirs “The Architecture of My Life”, which Igor Yasulovich reads; finally, stories from members of Melnikov’s large family, who remember the constructivist masterpiece as a living space, and the architect as a grandfather. Some work in the house-museum, others – like Melnikov’s granddaughter Ekaterina Karinskaya – remember him far from the hell of the city and the maddened crowd.
“Return to Reason”
Man Ray, 1923
A three-minute avant-garde sketch by Man Ray, consisting of abstract figures, photograms, glare, flashes, the silhouette of a carousel and projections onto the chest of Kiki from Montparnasse, the director’s friend and favorite model of the surrealists. This Dadaist experiment can offer viewers a completely unique experience – for example, depending on the soundtrack: existing versions allow you to see “Return to Reason” as a mechanical dance of the 20th century, techno-horror on the verge of cyberpunk, a space odyssey of consciousness and what not. The newest sound is provided by Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan, collaborating within the framework of the Squerl group and the restoration of Man Ray’s experiments. They call their version of “Return to Reason” ecstatic, reflecting the author’s irony: the war and post-war 1920s require either coming to your senses or completely letting go of the reins of imagination.
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