What to watch at the Message to Man Festival – Weekend – Kommersant
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From October 21 to October 29, St. Petersburg will host the 32nd Message to Man International Film Festival, one of the oldest in Russia, specializing in documentary and experimental films. After the announcement of the withdrawal from Russia of Artdocfest, which the organizers failed to hold this year, Message to Man has become the main show of documentary and auteur films in Russia. From more than 100 premieres of the festival, Weekend chose the most interesting ones.
opening film
“Lily and the Sea”
Dinara Drukarova
The directorial debut of a French actress of Russian origin, remembered by the domestic audience for her leading role in Alexei Balabanov’s film “About Freaks and People.” “Lily and the Sea” is an adaptation of the autobiographical book by traveler Catherine Pullen, which tells about her experience working on a fishing boat in Alaska. Dinara Drukarova, who herself plays the main role, from the first frames indicates the conflict between the fragile stubbornness of her heroine and the male world, which cannot learn to see a person in a woman. The feigned severity of the men surrounding Lily is replaced by the same feigned respect for her decisions and actions, but the only engine in their communication with the woman on the ship is the desire to tame and domesticate her – for the night or for life. It seems that they simply physiologically cannot agree that they lose in beauty and maintenance to the sea, rocks and fish. Drukarova’s slightly detached play and the stunningly beautiful landscapes shot by cameraman Timo Salminen convincingly prove that this is indeed the case.
international competition
“Nikolae”
Mihai Grecu
“Men and women, villagers, amazing news: Nicolae Ceausescu is back! It’s not a joke! Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu is resurrected!” – with such a cry from the loudspeaker, a car is driving through the Romanian village. An interesting event is planned here soon: the dictator shot in 1989, displayed in the form of a holographic projection, will perform before the residents. But before he talks about three decades of failures of capitalism, disillusionment with liberal democracy and the prospects for rapprochement with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to the applause and tears of local residents, the authors of the film will talk to those who still remember socialist Romania. Quite expectedly, former prisoners of the dictatorship miss their former “national greatness”, free education and the distribution of housing.
“Holidays”
Antoine Cattin
Russia is a country of endless celebration. At least, if you believe the statistics, according to which our state is the leader in the number of days off. The Swiss documentary filmmaker Antoine Cattin, who made films with Pavel Kostomarov and worked with Alexander Rastorguev (the film is dedicated to him), observed his heroes during public holidays for several years (in accordance with Rastorguev’s precepts, the cameras were also provided to the heroes themselves). Described in the credits as a “visiting Kazakh,” Juice sells Christmas trees at the New Year’s market, fumbles with documents, and interrogates long-legged soldiers at the Victory Day parade about the origin of their medals; trolleybus driver Dina becomes a political activist and dreams of a Russian national state; the head of the housing and communal services department, Anna Fedorovna, is fighting the St. Petersburg icicles and plans to move to Ukraine; Rufer Nikita is learning the art of flying a drone, a skill that will soon come in handy in the military. The recognizable comedy of Russian absurdity gradually turns into an ominous omen of a fatal era.
“Character”
Paul Heinz
French director and artist Paul Heinz decided to get acquainted with all the Winston Smiths – the full namesakes of the protagonist of George Orwell’s immortal novel “1984”. Six responded to the call, five of whom are black. One, born in 1984 proper, broadcasts his exercises live, another works as a security guard and looks at surveillance cameras all day, the life of the third is so revealingly prosperous and boring that even he himself seems creepy. Shooting on 8mm film makes the film seem archival, and for good reason: Heinz is not interested in modernity, but in how it reflects artifacts from other eras and cultural narratives.
national competition
“Thin Fields”
Dmitry Lukyanov
On the outskirts of Suzdal, the Research Institute of Agriculture operated in Soviet times. The empty pea fields overgrown with weeds are now being settled by a private Moscow company, which has decided to create a selection and seed-growing center here. To the misfortune of the main characters, employees of the institute are attached to the fertile fields of the research institute: they suspect farmers of fraud and do not trust outsiders who believe in reptilians and hang strange spirals from the barn ceiling to save agriculture. Therefore, while the heroes call psychics to raise the harvest, the locals put candles in the church so that their fields do not rise. Dmitry Lukyanov, a graduate of the School of Documentary Film and Theater of Marina Razbezhkina and Mikhail Ugarov, made a lyrical comedy about the clash and confrontation of deeply Soviet people who, after the collapse of the USSR, found themselves without ground under their feet and are trying in vain to find it in magical and religious practices.
“Your room, top”
Dasha Likhaya
Twenty-year-old Sasha from a million-plus city in southern Russia recalls her childhood, when her mother went on a drinking binge, and her father brought home a wolf cub. Don’t wait for chernukha – this is a poetic essay film, composed of reconstructed fragments of memories and deliberately literary intertitles like “the wolf was taken to the suburbs, and then he quietly died.” Everything here is built on sensations and memory reconstruction: a warm house, twilight, the flickering of the TV with your favorite video game (“Crash Bandicoot”) on the console, “cocoa sweet with sugar inside”, a trip to your father in a cold train. A film that appeals to the viewer’s personal memory phantoms.
“Orphans”
Alexey Sukhovey
The first documentary series in the Messages to Man competition. Graduates of a correctional boarding school face difficulties and choices of adult life. Where to find a job? With whom to build a family? Who to target? Who can be trusted? Each of them was abandoned by their parents in infancy, but they are maniacally trying to find their roots and look either into the eyes or at the graves of those from whom they were born. The serial form is perfect for this story: dramatic hooks, plot lines carved on editing, gradual development of characters. The film was shot without pity for the characters, which therefore does not arise in the viewer either. Aleksey Sukhovey, a graduate of the Marina Razbezhkina and Mikhail Ugarov School of Documentary Film and Theater, does not turn away from a single awkward moment, but never looks down. The heroes constantly stick together, forming either an orphan brotherhood, or an orphan ghetto, and only by the end of the film, it becomes clear that they are actually united by a fantastic and inexplicable love for those who betrayed them.
“It runs in my blood”
Masha Black
The last week of summer 2021 in the Volga city of Yuryevets, Ivanovo region. Yesterday’s eleventh-graders yell on the embankment, saw tiktok, turn on Scryptonite and Tsoi on portable speakers, share their plans for life in the language of obscenities, interjections and unexpected poetic maxims like dreams of a “house with a green roof.” Soon everyone will disperse – some to study, some to work, some to the army. The planning horizon is limited to the nearest sunset. Dreams dissipate with mist. From the visible prospects: a beggarly life in his native town or departure to nowhere in the country. True, one of the heroes wants to enroll in the Special Operations Forces, because the army pays and the future is there. It flows in his blood, which he looks into like water.
program “Panorama.doc”
“Coin of the country of Malawi”
Alexey Fedorchenko
Director Alexei Fedorchenko, together with cameraman Alisher Khamidkhodzhaev, went to Altai to watch the celebrations of the 90th anniversary of Vasily Shukshin. Starting as a comedy about the senseless and merciless politics of memory in modern Russia (ranging from concerts on the order and official speeches to Kalina Krasnaya vodka and terry towels with the image of the writer), the film turns towards a touching biography of modern Shukshin weirdos. A self-taught accordion player, an Altai winemaker, a poet living in poverty – all these and many other heroes are easy to imagine in the stories of Vasily Makarovich.
program “New Voices”
“Pebbles”
P.S. Vinotraj
The pearl of the New Voices program compiled by Mikhail Ratgauz is the debut of the Tamil director P.S. Vinotraja. The film became one of the most high-profile events in Indian cinema in recent years and was sent to the Oscars. Vinotraj, drawing on his childhood memories and family history, filmed a story about an emotionally unrestrained alcoholic who kicked his wife out of the house, and then went with his young son in search of her in the desert. The masterful staging is adjacent to the documentary texture – the supporting roles were played by the inhabitants of small villages. Do not expect songs and dances, but the energy of this picture is in full swing.
program “Red Africa”
“Red Africa”
Alexander Markov
A chronicle of tragicomic relations between African countries and the Soviet authorities, beginning with Khrushchev and ending in 1991. From hundreds of hours of Soviet documentaries, Alexander Markov edited a 69-minute film that explores the phenomenon of Soviet colonialism based on the chronicle of visits by general secretaries and official delegations. The language of propaganda seems to fascinate even the author himself, but it is really hard not to succumb to it. And besides, Markov has collected a film program of the same name, in which you can watch both Soviet propaganda and the decolonial works of Suleiman Cisse and Abderrahman Sissako, who studied at VGIK with Grigory Chukhrai, Marlen Khutsiev and Boris Volchek.
experimental competition In Silico
“Dots, lines and zigzags”
Nikita Spiridonov
Artavazd Peleshyan’s method of remote editing, retold in two minutes. Based on the texts of the great Armenian director, who was highly appreciated by Jean-Luc Godard, the artist and curator Nikita Spiridonov tells in graphs, formulas and diagrams what Peleshyan’s innovation is and what is common between science and the art of cinema. After that, he shows how remote editing works on specially digitized works by the amateur film studio Dubna-Film.
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