Khanty-Mansiisk 2003

Welcome to Siberia!
The First Spirit of Fire Film Festival
By Klaus Eder

What an adventure. Siberia? Isn't this almost a synonym for extreme coldness, in January down to minus thirty centigrade and less? In December, the news report minus thirty from Moscow. In Siberia, it will then be minus forty? Less? How to survive this, as middle-European who is equipped for mild winters only? The friends whom you tell that you're going to Siberia, in the middle of the winter, think you're crazy, a hopeless case and not anymore of sound mind. The idea of an extreme cold becomes indeed the more obsessive the nearer the event comes. The employee of a Munich specialist shop for extreme mountaineering introduces me to the "onion principle": one regular undershirt, one thermo undershirt, one pullover, another one, an anorak; underpants, thermo underpants, pants, over pants... and then, arriving in Siberia and fit out like an Eskimo preparing an excursion to the North Pole, it turned out that most of the undies and pants aren't needed - because the thermometer shows minus five to ten degrees only, it's like a winter kurort in the Black Forest; and because the friendly hosts had prepared, as a precaution, warm cloths for the guests. Admittedly, it was an unusual "warm" period, at the end of January of 2003, with the temperature falling to minus 20 on only one day. In the margin, the Russian colleages taking the same charter flight from the Moscow airport of Domodjedevo, had the same misgivings about Siberia and were as well prepared for the worst.

Siberia. The longer one stays outside in the cold, the colder it gets. Excursion to the Taiga. According to its myth it should be a most rough and unfriendly landscape. Which it is indeed. Snow as far as the eye reaches, bushes, forests (a lot of birches which here seem to be poor trees of no particular use). The cold creeps through the cloths. And nothing within reach to warm yourself. One experiences another feeling of space. The part of Siberia in which the festival takes place, the region of Khanty-Mansiisk, is a little bigger than France, but populated by 1.5 mio people only. You can for sure drive for days without meeting anybody. If you can drive at all. The "street" is a kind of ford in the snow and exists in winter only, in summer it's covered by water or swamp. In the middle of the landscape: a ship, it's an image like in a surrealist movie. The ship must be stuck in a frozen river, but the river and its banks disappear under the snow. The landscape doesn't have any structure. Just snow. Later on, from a helicopter, the dimensions get even more creepy: the Taiga looks like a deserted land, without human beings, without animals (even if there are some, such as reindeers). Hardly to believe that prisoners ever managed to escape from one of the lagers whereto the Stalinist regime had banished its real or supposed enemies and, later on, the pows. Even hard to imagine how the Germans from the Volga regions, who under the Stalinist rule had been settled in Siberian villages, or the Lithuanians exiled from their country, could survive here. In this desolate landscape, you get the impression that it's easier to die than to live.

But there's a "big" city, the capital of the region: Khanty-Mansiisk. 50.000 inhabitants. Some fifty years ago, it did not exist, and older maps don't record it. It was a village of the Khanty and the Mansy tribes (whose culture today is exposed in an ethnographical museum). The city got big and rich with the oil and natural gas mined in the region, some hundred kilometers away - oil and gas which today makes the region one of Russia's richest. New houses, often in an Alaska style, a sport center plus hotel, a brand-new airport, a cultural center, shops, even a filmmakers club. A multiplex and an university to be built. Times of a gold rush, better: oil rush. Not yet much of culture. That's why the politicians of the region invented and supported the idea of a film festival, idea which was highly accepted by the local audience. In around one week, 25.000 visitors came to see the festival program - statistically, half of the population.

It's nevertheless a crazy idea to run a festival in the middle of nowhere, thousands of kilometers away from Moscow, in a new city without structures nor traditions for such an event. Filmmaker Sergei Solovyov and script writer Maria Zvereva were clever and courageous enough to accept the idea and the money offered by the region - and might at the end have been much surprised that the whole festival worked out and went well, if not to say marvelous. They were as well clever enough to bring almost the whole team from Moscow - including the catering and the waiters. The rooms in the sport hotel Seven Hills (a main building plus some wooden houses with a series of small apartments in each) were new furnished. Only pictures on the wall were still missing, so Masha Zvereva organized a series of photos from Andrei Tarkovski's films, to be framed and put on the walls. I enjoyed a photo of Oleg Jankovski, carrying a candle, in the famous long shot from Nostalghia.

The scene from Nostalghia was shown at the well choreographed opening ceremony, and was doubled by the real Oleg Jankovski carrying on stage a real candle. It was an homage to Andrei Tarkovski, to whom the festival dedicated an exhibition and showed some of his films. This was a good idea, because probably no one in Khanty-Mansiisk ever had the opportunity to see them, and because the Russian public prefers nowadays (at least in Moscow and probably also in Khanty-Mansiisk) the Hollywood blockbusters and needs to be reminded that there were great periods of Russian cinema as well. (*) Other homages were presented to the French actors Pierre Richard and Michèle Mercier whose Angélique is still remembered in Russia.

The main competition focused on debuts (first and second features) and was accompanied by a retrospective of Russian debuts 1991-2002 (among them the first films of Lidia Bobrova, Nikolai Lebedev, Andrei Proshkin, Alexei Balabanov, Dmitry Meshkiev). Some of the twelve films in competition did already tour through the festival circuit (On_Line by Jed Weintrob) or did reach the art house distribution (Sandra Nettelbeck's Mostly Martha, Samsara by Pan Nalin). Does not matter much: the main prize of 150.000 USD (most of the money to be spent for a new film) is attractive also for them and will for sure be a good reason for young filmmakers to present their debuts at the festival's next editions.

The first winner of the Golden Taiga was the Czech director Petr Zelenka and his film Year of the Devil (Rok d'ábla). This is indeed a remarkable film. It does not try to be commercial (as quite some other first films, also in the Khanty-Mansiisk competition), but unfolds a carefree filmic imagination about rather unusual, even crazy people - an alcoholic folk singer, a band of funeral musicians who long for recognition and success, a Dutch documentary film maker who prefers to keep silence. Petr Zelenka (who wrote also the script) gives them a lot of time and space and sympathy to develop their peculiar characters, and brings them together using the music to which they dedicate their lives. The film has a certain feeling for an experiment, for trying something - rare quality among the recent debuts as shown in Khanty-Mansiisk.

For the next edition, the organizers need more time (which they didn't have for the first festival) to compose an interesting overview on worldwide young cinema (including for example Latin America or China or Japan, countries which were missing this time). Then, the next step could be to create a sort of script competition, helping future filmmakers to realize their first productions, following the examples of the Rotterdam or Locarno funding systems. With a relatively small amount of money, a relatively good number of new projects can be supported.

And there's an additional attraction: Siberia. Yes, it's cold. But it's also fascinating. Want an adventure? Go there.

Klaus Eder
© FIPRESCI 2003

(*) This whole conflict between the blockbusters and the art cinema is to be seen in an extremely obvious way in the Moscow Kinozentr, which hosts a multiplex as well as the Film Museum headed by Naum Klejman. Of course the multiplex claims the facades and most of the space, while to visit the Film Museum you have to look for a hidden side entrance.

PS. A trip to Russia begins in your own city. You need a visa. You fax your passport to the organizers in Moscow, who apply to the Foreign Ministry, which informs the embassy or consulate in your city. This information arrives the day before you are supposed to leave. You pass dozens of Russians waiting outside the consulate and manage to find the attention of an official. It takes him only twenty minutes to verify that the visa information from Moscow did indeed arrive. He checks the form you've filled in. "You have to pay", he says. Okay. "When do you want the visa?" Immediately, because the next morning the plane is leaving. "You pay 155 Euro!" Oops - this is the most expensive visa I ever had. But okay. I pull out my credit card. "We don't accept credit card." I look for the last Euros and Cents in my pockets. "We don't accept cash." "And what do you accept?" "A bank transfer." I run to the bank, fill in a transfer, run back to the consulate, with the bank confirmation. The official presents the next bad news. "You need a health insurance!" As a good German, I've one. "We don't accept your insurance!" "And what do you accept?" He presents a list of "authorized" insurance companies. Fortunately, the German automobile club is there. It's accepted - even if the insurance is valid only in context with a car, and I really don't intend to go to Siberia by car. Five to noon, I hold the visa in my hands.

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