Moscow 2008

Moscow, 1983 ("Epilogue")

The province, 2008 ("Once Upon a Time in the Provinces")

In his 1983 movie Epilogue (Poslesloviye), Marlen Khutsiyev presents Moscow as a modern city. Big jets leave for worldwide destinations. Wide streets teem with the newest cars. The proudly filmed tower blocks designed in Stalin’s era join newly constructed skyscrapers. An intellectual's apartment is presented as spacious and equipped with elegant furniture and the newest technology. (This petit-bourgeois luxury makes the people lonesome, adds Khutsiyev, but that's another story).
    Over thirty years later, Moscow is still a gigantic building site, but the reason behind it is no longer the post-Brezhnev ideology of creating an image of Moscow as an open-minded and trendy modern city. Today, the construction of new buildings booms simply because it’s good business — and this business shows scarce consideration for historically significant architectural structures. (One of the traditional buildings in danger is the "Domkino", the House of Film, center of cinema for decades.)
    Even the Moscow Festival looks like a building site. Funding was granted just two months before the event, and it borders on the miraculous that the colleagues in charge of the program, Kirsi Tykkyläinen and Andrei Plakhov, managed to bring in some of the best films of the season, mainly in sidebars (such as "Reflections" and "Moscow Euphoria"). The main competition, however, needs to be improved, in particular because Moscow must position itself between Cannes in May, Karlovy Vary in July and Venice at the beginning of September. That the festival still holds a certain attraction could be seen at the opening, where festival president Nikita Mikhalkov proudly introduced Liv Ullmann, Emir Kusturica and Takeshi Kitano, as well as the spectacle of Will Smith and Charlize Theron appearing for the world premiere of Hancock — a strange choice for an opening film, especially for a festival which had, once upon a time, honored Fellini's 8½ with pride of place.
    Naum Klejman, who heads the Moscow Film Museum and who is undoubtedly the country's most knowledgeable film historian, made it possible for Moscow filmgoers to make their first acquaintance with the work of the Korean director Im Kwon-taek, and organized an homage to István Szabó as well. His no less knowledgeable colleague Jevgenij Margolit composed a series on "Socialist Avant-Gardism" (Abuladze, Pudovkin, Kalatozov, Yutkevich, Room, and others). How lovely to see that these screenings attended mainly by a younger public, which has the chance to discover classics of Soviet cinema.  
   At the occasion of the festival's 30th edition, Derek Malcolm, Honorable President of FIPRESCI, and Klaus Eder, FIPRESCI's General Secretary, as well as former General Secretary Marcel Martin were honored, with a medal, for their merits in favor of Russian cinema. (k.e.)

30. Moscow International Film Festival, June 19-28, 2008, www.moscowfilmfestival.ru
FIPRESCI Prize: Once Upon a Time in the Provinces (Odnazhdi v provincii), second feature by Katya Shagalova. Details

Reports

Two reviews of the winning film, Katya Shagalova's Once Upon a Time in the Provinces:
     A Little Town, Far Away from Trouble. Mike Naafs proposes to go to the province, to find peace — and finds people that are wounded, get drunken with frieds and suffer from unemployment.
     The End of the Road. Klaus Eder sees Katya Shagalova's film as the successful work of a young auteur, exploring the hopelessness of everyday life in a Russian village and bumping into disasters and a life full of disappointment and despair.
More reports:
Little Mao, Big Trouble. In the competition program, Francisco Ferreira discovered a totally unexpected Albanian title, Mao Tse Tung, directed by Besnik Bisha. The film, he writes, "is far from being a masterpiece, but it has enough generosity to believe in its gypsy father-hero and in the legend he creates around him."
Born to Fly. In his film The Birds of Paradise, Ukrainian filmmaker Roman Balayan dives back to the early 80s in Kiev and tells about young people who start their grown-up lives with enthusiasm and big hopes, only to find out that they've believed in illusions. Balayan replicates, says Natalia Primakova in her review, the style of Soviet cinema of the 70s and 80s, but uses it for a frank address.
It's Hard Out There for a Chick. Mahrez Karoui sees similarities between the heroines in the Iranian film As Simple As That (by Seyyed Reza Mir-Karimi) and the Italian film Days and Clouds (by Silvio Soldini). Both, he writes, "are victims of their status as women in a world where it is really hard to be a woman".

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