What’s on at the Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival

The largest international documentary film festival IDFA continues in Amsterdam. This year it showed, among other things, several films related in one way or another to Russia and neighboring countries. He talks about them Andrey Plakhov.

Actually, Russia appears in the “producing countries” column only once: we are talking about the film “Dirt” by Ilya Povolotsky from the Envision Competition. By the way, this is the only director who represented Russian cinema at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Povolotsky spent the filming of the new work in the genre of film parables at a historical, apparently Caucasian resort, where time seemed to have stopped or turned back. Women suffering from bone ailments immerse their bodies in healing mud and then wash it off in the shower. You can also say “in the soul” with the emphasis on the last syllable. Scenes of procedures and preparation of mud baths are interrupted by news reports from the Ukrainian front; Young soldiers also appear among the patients of the hospital, but this does not change the sleepy rhythm of the illusory resort idyll.

The short film competition includes an experimental animadoc by Nastya Korkia and Vlad Fishez “Dreams about Putin”, made in co-production in Belgium, Hungary and Portugal. Using the 3D graphics program Unreal Engine, commonly used for computer games, the authors turn into animation the dreams Russians have about their president, published on social networks: as the film moves towards the end, they become increasingly surreal.

At the opening of IDFA they showed “Photo for Memory” – a poetic film essay of Ukrainian-French-German production. Director Olga Chernykh made a very personal debut film about her family, which since 2014 has been divided by a de facto border. Three generations of women: the grandmother remained in Donetsk, the granddaughter and her mother, a pathologist, moved to Kyiv. Nostalgic memories “from the family album”, traumas and losses, confrontation with a new reality – all this is woven into a dreamlike mix of time and space, into a kaleidoscope of individual and collective emotions. Olga’s mother and her colleagues find shelter from the bombings and drink champagne in the morgue. Photographs of human tissue examined through a microscope turn into a genuine landscape – and suddenly a drone appears above it. Surrealism, which flowed from the fantasies of radical artists into life.

In the main international feature competition, the film “1489” stands out. This is another deeply personal story inscribed in the historical framework, told by the Armenian Shoghakat Vardanyan. Her 21-year-old brother Soghomon, a student and musician called up for military service, has gone missing: one of many victims of the bloody conflict with Azerbaijan. Overcoming pain and depression, Shoghakat films the life of his family, tormented by the horror of the unknown, but trying to maintain hope at all costs. It removes both the search process and the despair of the parents when the remains of their son are supposedly found, but have not yet been identified. They are recorded under number 1489, after which a months-long DNA study begins, leading the film’s characters to a new round of moral torment.

Talented women are the authors of most of the best works presented at IDFA. Vardanyan’s experience is unusual in that she is a pianist by training, did not study at film schools and worked on the film alone, using an iPhone as an instrument. All the more amazing is the high technical and artistic quality of the filming. It is also necessary to pay tribute to the director’s courage that accompanies the most painful, on the verge of madness, moments of the film: when the mother of the deceased presses his bones to her chest and says that he has finally returned to his home.

Serious professional assistance to the young filmmaker was provided by the most experienced director and teacher Marina Razbezhkina, whom Shoghakat met in Dilijan at a documentary filmmakers’ seminar. The Razbezhkin school in today’s documentary cinema is the best; its analogue can be the one created by Alexander Sokurov in feature films. Agniya Galdanova, one of Razbezhkina’s first students, presented the film “Queendom” (USA, France) in Amsterdam, and it confidently leads the festival’s audience rating. Together with director Ruslan Fedotov, who acts here as a cameraman, Galdanova, at a high emotional level, creates a documentary portrait of a person who is not ready to fit into Russian society.

Gena, an orphan from Magadan, raised by his grandparents, dresses in grotesque costumes, calls himself feminine and refuses to register with the military registration and enlistment office. Being a black sheep in her hometown, she finds a kindred environment in Moscow and even gains some recognition as a designer and queer model. In March 2022, after a conflict with law enforcement officers, he leaves Russia. From Paris he calls his grandparents, who understand that they will never see their grandson again. Another private story against the backdrop of global events.