Perspectives
Dir. Rob Nilsson

A small sketch from the life of Ukrainian emigrant woman Miri, who – after her husband had deceased – is trying to contrive the small hotel she owns, placed in a porch of a house in some troubled district of San Francisco suburbs. There is an international cacophony of sounds in the air – English, German and French tongues are found side by side with the story about Holocaust told by Ukrainian host on a radio and with the sounds of Russian songs, coming from the only decent restaurant in this distinct. The community is quite relevant. There is homeless who’s feeding Miri, when things get too bad. A seller in a small shop, who’s come to USA from Germany. A black man, who’s living in Miri’s hotel with his children and stealing money from her to buy drugs. A female bartender – also and emigrant (from Paris), who is playing solitaire and is bragging about the love adventures of her past. Soon Miri’s niece will suddenly come with a visit and will experience some difficulties getting used to all this poor scenery.

Just the same thing – poor scenery, but of the film, not the hotel – is the first thing to be noticed, even before the main credits start. Rob Nilsson, being classic and cult figure of American independent cinema and also one of the first authors to start experimenting with video, has finally come to extremes in his aspiration to move far away from traditional cinema. Image in “The Steppes” reminds of that shot by mobile phone. The sound is recorded by microphones hidden under the clothes, with results in awful rasp in moments of embracement. Outside, the sound of wind is so strong, that almost drowns the words of characters, and real citizens of San-Francisco function as extras, seemingly having no idea they are being pictured. But one can easily adapt to all of this: together with respectabilities the characters start to lose their masks, which differs them from real people. Abrupt picturing starts looking as the fragment from someone’s private archives, and all together it turns out to be one more proof of the common statement that it doesn’t really matter what optics does the author use. What matters is what this optics is picturing.

Nikita Kartsev

This year we have finally made a short film contest, and we made it in the Internet. This is importaint for two reasons: first, short films section has never been a contest before, and we are happy that this first competition is users' choice, because viewers are usually the most honest audience. Second thing is the Internet - partly or fully, movig into the interactivity is a powerfull tendency among the festivals, and like it or not, it is tomorrow.

Also, it's locigal that first Internet competition is short films one - shorts have always been the most flexible and fresh area of the cinema. Most of the authors are young and independent, so their films really reflect what they wanted to say, especially if it is something linked to videoart, formal experiments animation - short films are very good territory for the experiments. For this year's contest we selected films that are very different - by genre, by language, by author's point of view - and our only request for the audience is not to be preconcieved. We are very interested ourselves in the results of the competition.

http://vision.rambler.ru/cinema/17223229/
Please, enjoy the films!

Perspectives
Dir. Mounir Maasri


Any director is flattered when he turns out to be a prophet. At a meeting some two years ago a young filmmaker was passionately insisting that the scenes with “bad cops” had been shot in that very precinct which later became notorious because of the major Yevsyukov’s case. He lamented that they had cut out the sign-boards. If that is the case, then Mounir Maasri can smile modestly without having to prove anything to anybody. His movie about revolutionary unrest in the Middle East (events in Lebanon ten years ago) was released perfectly on time. Including “direct hits”: Syria is the hot news and in “Huvelin Street” the group of merry students fight the army of that country…

There is no need to go into the subtleties of Middle-eastern history (who occupied whom and why and what is the pretext for the presence of foreign troops in the country) to understand the restlessness of these youngsters for whom their not too secret activities in the underground student organization as merely part of their tumultuous, risky youth, their robust life. That is what is so charming about all their gatherings, get-togethers with girls and guitars and heated arguments about the best way to oppose the military: by surprise or silently with stickers saying “Freedom” covering their mouths. The night before the final face-down these nice guys boisterously smoke at the poker table and ask each other what is going to happen the next day. The metaphor for the message of the movie (or at least one of the messages) could be the scene in which Joy, a dark-haired revolutionary, can barely drag the heavy suitcase into his room in the hostel. “Flags? Leaflets?” demands the strict janitor. Somehow Joy manages to persuade him that it is only summer clothes. Anything could be expected, even weapons, but instead a girl jumps out of the suitcase in the room. It can’t be helped. In Russian just like in Lebanon, guards in hostels are especially strict about the morals of the students.

This does not invalidate their sincere hatred of the occupants. In general where there is public spirit, the youthful student racket becomes more meaningful. The youngsters are so passionately running about the night campus, hiding Lebanese flags in the bushes. How enthusiastically they meet an American journalist in a café: they seem to be saying very bold things, but at the same time are fearful lest it all should appear in the news.

But the principal plotline seems a bit artificial. Ives, an incipient journalist, is happy to have acquired a new camera and can now shoot everything during their gatherings. But the sudden (!) realization of how misery his salary is, forces him to sell the most explosive shots to the newspaper… It is hard do say why he opens the Pandora box: the driving forces, the conditions, the conflict are – to put it bluntly – a far cry form the “Ascent” by Larisa Shepitko. But there is a certain fundamental truth. It is felt in the demands of friends that Ives, a creative personality, should fight almost with an automatic gun, but he is not at all happy about the idea that word should be equaled to bayonet. It probably is no accident that in one of the scenes the director makes Ives sit next to Che Gevara’s portrait. The haircut, the beard, the moustache are all exact copies of those in the picture. This is the message: don’t put pressure on a creative personality, he will definitely sell everybody out.

Igor Saveliev

Perspectives
Dir. Lee Young-mi

A woman in her forties, a university professor, is carrying out scientific research on a relevant theme: “Changes in female psychology following marital unfaithfulness”. The story of her unfortunate personal life (but that is a big “secret”) is told by… an inanimate object, by a copier, so let us forgive a certain straightforwardness of the narration. The copier is worried: since the time its owner hired a new assistant for her sociological research, her life has become all messed-up. The young man has the looks of a super model as though he stepped down from the video supplement to the South Korean version of “Penthouse”.
It became especially noticeable after the professor and the student interviewed a lascivious woman who enthusiastically cheated on her husband and had no remorse about it.

This fateful encounter had a deep effect on the professor. She looked at her student with different eyes and it occurred to her academic mind to do with him what is very reluctantly indulged in (judging by the movie) with middle-aged women in South Korea. But her views which proved to be not so liberal prevented this lady with the Internet nickname “Liberalcunt” from accomplishing an instant transition from words to actions. There are a number of reasons. First of all, the rigid morals still do not allow a South Korean woman (especially an older one) to look upon a man (especially a youth) as a sexual “object” (the morals, naturally, do not look the other way). Secondly, the traditional Confucian approach denies any erotic overtones in the lofty relations between the teacher and the disciple.

In her feature-length debut, which caused an uproar in her native country, the 45-year-old feminist Lee Young-mi boldly challenged the obsolete taboos, but unfortunately did no find the radical artistic means to express these legitimate protests. Feminine sexual longing is shown with the help of trite metaphors worthy of erotic Hollywood blockbusters like “Wild Orchid” or “Two Moon Juncture”, intended for the same grateful audience but shot by men. Subconsciously copying those movies, the brave Young-mi turns her romantic hero into a voyeristic sexual object, who is as animate as silicone sex symbols from movies directed by males. They admire females as impotents would and possess them purely symbolically.

Stas Tyrkin

Competition
Dir. Dragan Bjelogrlić

The characters in the film are often wiping out their tears. One would say – isn’t it usual for a Eastern European film about some events of the 20th century? – and would be completely wrong. Because those are the tears of joy. Dragan Bjelogrlić’s film is unique in its own way for contemporary cinema – it is optimistic all the way through. The movie starts with a scene of virtuosic football play performed by a young boy called Tirke. As it usually goes, Tirke find it difficult to find a job, which saddens his mother, but constantly insists that he has a strong moral core, conscience and ethics instead. And when Tirke’s skills are noticed by Bosko Simonovic, the feature coach of the national team… Well, the following course of the film is easy to predict: up to a huge success of Serbian national team in the play vs. Bulgaria.

It is interesting to watch this almost chemical reaction, which is being built by the director: to watch a few dashing boys create an almost sacred fraternity and develop such “triumph of will” that it seems like they could make almost anything. Let’s say, to get to World Cup in Montevideo, where they didn’t even hoped to come. Or knock teeth out of a jerky son of the Prime Minister. Or to dislocate from jail to royal castle… It seems like they could really make anything.

The subplot “soccer instead of war” starts to sound in the film in a subtle way: everybody knows, what’s going to happen in Europe in a few years, when it will be no time for sport (the action takes place in 1930). FIFA has just been created. World Cup in Montevideo is the first one in history. Most of the characters in the film take words “soccer” and “Montevideo” as some kind of swearing and can’t understand how grown up men can waste their time on this. Of how can anyone barter away a position of apprentice at the factory “Ikarus” to be a leading forward in the national team… Films about people who put their houses up, lie to their relatives and risk everything, believing in nothing but their dream, have some purgative meaning. So after “Montevideo” one would probably want to let all the routine fly, throw away the cell phone, right here, by the cinema hall, and run away anywhere where the real life is.

And in the same time Serbs would not be themselves, if their national tragedy didn’t reflect through the football drive of the film. The King is willing to send “the national team of Yugoslavia” to the championship, but on a condition that there will be some Croations in there. The Croations refuse. A local tycoon is ready to put his money in the trip, but only if the team will be called Serbian, and not Yugoslavian. It is the team now who says no… And so you start to shiver unwillingly, when you hear the words: “Yugoslavia has signed a convention with the court in Hague”.

It is not without a reason that the film may seem simple-minded at first. The key to it lies in the words, that are pronounced in the first minutes on screen. “It was the best decade – after the big war… Then we didn’t yet what a real big war means”. The times before war are always simple-minded. In fact, the 21st of June in 1941 in Russian films is filled with sounds of “Riorita”.

The best players of the film, Tirke and Mosa are often having fun playing with a raw chicken egg. And a prophecy is told: ones who are able not to break the egg by playing with it, are going to die soon. The real Mosa (Blagoje Marjanovic) and Tirke (Aleksandar Tirnanic), the stars of soccer, have lived a long life. But artistic world has its own laws. And you never know, what’s waiting for these dashing boys after “the best decade” will be over.

Igor Saveliev

Competition
Dir. Levan Tutberidze

You must be a football fan to understand how the protagonist, a 38-year-old writer Zaza, managed to make a large scoop. Otherwise his exclamations about sir Alex Fergusson and Jose Alvalade, who owns a stadium in Lisbon, will be gibberish to the viewer. Even more so because Zaza uses it in everyday life. He welcomes the women going to the funeral with the words: “Ah, Sicilian weepers! Let me introduce myself. Gaetano Donizetti! Gaetano, very pleased!” Yes, Zaza won at the football pools, so don’t imagine anything about underground lotteries in Tbilisi. As for the money for the bet, it was borrowed from an old drug dealer, whose fridge will be the convergence point for all the paths in this tangled story with a strong criminal taste a la Guy Ritchie. Having clarified the point about the football pools it would be noble to let the viewer get the pleasure of puzzling out the rest.

We would like to focus on how the filmmakers use the wide screen, which was rare in Georgian cinema even in Soviet times (only Abuladze’z “The Entreaty” comes to mind), while for the cinema of the independent Georgia this is downright extraordinary. When in some country filmmakers start using the wide screen, it means the cinema of this country has gained sufficient momentum. But the pretty dilapidated Tbilisi of the present day is not a very good setting for the wide screen and the director Tutberidze found a witty and probably the only possible way out, using glamorous foreign visual quotations as pieces of the puzzle. They are of such diverse origin, that one can’t help being amazed at the director’s knowledge of cinema. Perhaps that is the origin of the line of dialogue in the movie, which expresses a very sane idea: “When you watch something alone, you become wiser”. For example when during a pause in the rehearsal one of the characters, a ballerina, records Zaza’s favourite song “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” on his cell-phone at his request, she walks across the stage under the flashlights of different colors, which cast colorful patches of light around her silhouette, and comes to a stop under a box, decorated with stucco mouldings and gilt like a temple. This is a direct quotation from the wide-screen musical “Corps-de-ballet” (the item called “Nothing”) which Tutberidze must have surely seen in Soviet cinemas at the time of his own film debut “Nazare’s Last Prayer”. Then characters who do not know each other, enter one and the same house, ring the doorbell, receive no answer and leave, walking further down the street. The camera pans on the first person from the roof, then up again, letting the first depart and the second approach during the same shot, and then pans down again. This is a quotation from the newest cinema. Gaspar Noé for example used this technique to record the wanderings of his characters, including the departing soul, through Tokyo in “Enter the Void”. Tutberidze, the author of the Georgian box-office hit “Trip to Karabakh” could have seen the film in Cannes, for example.

But even more interesting than the use of the new scale, unfamiliar not only to himself, but to the country, was one daring, indecent and, by consequence, immediately alluring association. Having sex with a prostitute in the sauna the gangster Mamuka almost at the moment of orgasm looks at his groin and remembers that the automatic gun which was used to shoot his friend to death today, had a red handle, bent like a banana (there is an immediate cross-cut to the automatic gun, which is currently store in the fridge). When the director’s logic can baffle you to that extent, it is worthwhile to say after the screening that while we were all having a good time, somewhere out there in the world cinema a great original was born!

Alexey Vasiliev

Competition
Dir. Feliks Falk

The fascist occupation of Krakow. Another anti-Jewish raid catches little Róza and her mother in a café, where she is enjoying cakes on the occasion of her sixth birthday. Mother tells her to run to the church and wait for her there. Róza’s mother never comes but Joanna, a young average woman her mother’s age will take the girl to live with her in a sturdy old house. On the chest of drawers there is a photo of Joanna and a young man, both wearing ski suits. They are herself and Zbyshek on the snow-covered range in Tatry during their holiday in Zakopane, when he proposed to her. Joanna waits for Zbyshek to comeback from the front and in the meantime hides Róza from the concierge’s curious gaze and reads her fairy tales in the evenings.

As a director Feliks Falk became known with his late 1970s movie “Wodzirej”, which our old-time moviegoers are likely to remember. It was the time when Zanussi very closely approached the formula of Polish Catholic melodrama, which will be exemplified in its purest form by his films based on events in the rear during the second world war («Rok spokojnego slonca», «Wherever You Are...»), and Kieslowski, who purified the genre in “Dekalog”, was getting ready to direct his feature-film debut. The essence of Polish Catholic melodrama is to show the world and the people surrounding the protagonist as walls which are gradually closing in and pushing the character out of this world (suicide or madness is the usual outcome for characters in these movies) which can be discerned in the light imperceptibly falling on the forehead of the heroine like a gloomy halo, or sometimes illuminating inanimate objects (like a boiling kettle in the hospital in Zanussi’s “Bilans kwartalny”). The same light barely touches Joanna’s curls, while the events of the movie, the retelling of which will deny you the pleasure of discovering the plot while watching the film, are nothing else but her gradual ousting from life. The claustrophobic effect is achieved by deadly blush hues of the flat and nearby streets, by frequents shots of the front door hall with the fateful figure of the postman in the shade and incessant ringing of the door bells, vigorous knocks, rattle of door chains on the soundtrack which the Russian mentality immediately associates with Mandelshtam’s poem about Leningrad reworked by Pugacheva.

Falk’s new film is conceived in such lofty traditions that even the almost total lack of originality can’t be called a drawback or a miscalculation: we don’t blame the organist for being faithful to Bach’s original. But there are a couple of surprise after all. One of them is the paradoxical, unusual, but fairly legitimate interpretation of one of the liveliest and most relevant French novels of the 19th century - Stendhal’s “Le Rouge et le Noir” - by the German officer. The second is the finale (which can be safely disclosed in the films of this genre because it is part of the formula). Instead of Polish classic filmmakers it calls to mind a German classic: Joanna walks away along the snow-covered range of the Tatry holding that very photo from the chest of drawers just like Anselm does in the closing lines of Hermann Hesse’s tale, when he completed the transition from this world to the spiritual world by retreating into an iris bud, which opened like a cave. In his youth it was the focus of his fantasies about invisible universes.

Alexey Vasiliev

Perspectives
Dir. Fabien Gaillard

This is a movie about the guy who went too far in the direct and (as many would say) indirect sense of the word. Paul from Limoges is a young man of about 30. He has been living in Shanghai for a long time now, he speaks Chinese fluently and introduces himself as Da Bao, although his round European peasant face won’t cheat anyone as far as his origins are concerned, especially when he rides his bike among steaming pots with fragrant foods in his woolen cap pulled over his ears and a tight jacket like some character from the early videos of “Pet Shop Boys”. He has accepted China as his new motherland but he is not bent on Eastern practices and even his first falling-out with his new girlfriend arises because, in his opinion, the food she cooks for him is too spicy and too Eastern. Actually, it is the familiar story about the love of the Brave Tin Soldier. He makes his living offering computer assistance, but exclusively as a freelancer. When his former sweetheart invites him to a party in the hope of introducing him to an over-dressed lady boss of a big company and talking about his permanent job, he will get drunk, bawl out songs, fall asleep and turn the job interview into an ugly farce. When another company fails to transfer the money to his credit card on time he will turn up at the office and kick up another brawl shoving business papers to the floor. It is right, work must be paid for and he is not going to work.

In this movie nobody cares for the everyday routine, neither the camera, nor he, nor his girlfriend Mei played by Dan Tong Han whose striking model appearance is enough to make everyone forgive her hysterics and bouts of depression facing the wall and for whose smile one is ready to pay a million. But instead it is very important to observe what exercises the aged from the health group are doing in the park today, what pensioners are playing backgammon in the yard and to see the expression on the faces of working guys coming home on the ferry across Yangtze this evening. The latter episode will take place when the action shifts to Wǔhàn, deeper into the mainland, where Mei's family home is and where she will escape having suspected her bridegroom of unfaithfulness. His watch by the princess’s palace will come down to his daily appearances in Wǔhàn 's street karaoke with his own songs.

It is a movie in which the denial of present-day corporate and social priorities in favor of non-violent but stubborn pursuit of one’s own immediate interests is the way to achieve the very basic and fundamental priority – the real noisy family dinner party where everyone is at one with everyone else. And besides it is a film where we hear the phrase: “To gain something you must first lose it, to get something first let it go; just like smoking a cigarette: when I smoke it, look, I let it go”. Cigarette smoke floats over the sleepy Yangtze and the utterance liners in thin air as a worthy object of deep meditation: after all, despite the director’s French name it is an utterly Chinese film.

AlexeY Vasiliev

Perspectives
Dir. Gaziz Nasyrov

Certain year of the 2000s. A journalist of some big paper, Tamerlan finds himself tied to a battery in some basement premise, after he was taken and kept hostage by mysterious group of men in black masks with eye holes. Tamerlan is instinctively preparing himself to lie about anything that he can be asked about. He tries to recall of the biased articles he has written recently, but can’t remember anything that could possible lead to this situation. Meanwhile, his capturers come to him and, using knocks and pastes, motivate him to make a virtual trip in time, going back to the eve of 2000 – the days, when Tamerlan and four other students of the philosophy department have just graduated and have been thinking what to next with their lives.

Two of these characters decide to move forward (one, focusing on his career, and the other – on his family), the only girl in the company also makes an ultimate decision – but in another direction – and commits suicide. And there are only Tamerlan and Kostya Paniotis who literally get stuck at some point of time and space. Having stayed in students’ dormitory, empty at summer days, they decide to rent a free room by the hour. Their clients, who altogether symbolize the sum of all human misfortunes and loneliness, are often paying with valuable effects, which young philosophers call “adequations of time”. Time here is really the protagonist of the film, that submits the whole aesthetics of it – starting from specific, slate-grey colors of the film and ending with the voice-over, which – in a style of Julio Cortázar – is read from the second person and in future tense. Time is also the general theme of young philosophers’ conversations (in one episode Kostya manages to explain the theory of the forth dimension while getting drunk with his friend). And they are philosophers for a reason, which is to show their double revery: not only they represent the generation lost between two epochs, between the past and the present of the country, but they are also graduated in such rare and unfortunate specialty, which never occurs to be profession – only the state of mind. And non-linear structure of the film finally builds up to be universal model of human memory that always functions like that – with random pieces of memories suddenly coming up in mind. And all of the film’s “magical realism”, that subtly suggests that student dormitory can symbolize a kind of a limbo, turns out be quite natural in the system given. All of the important events have already taken place in the past. Time is ruthlessly sweeping away everything that stands in its way, and a person can sometimes find himself at the point of crossing of two time lines. In Stephen King’s novel creates called Langoliers came in such cases, literally swallowing yesterday away; it is not a hard job to believe that sometimes this function can be easily performed by a few man in black masks.

Olga Artemieva

Competition
Dir. Lucio Pellegrini

To the traditionally disturbing sounds of tango performed in an intentionally carefree way (bravo the composer Gabriele Roberto!) the white introductory titles speed away along the white separator (hello, Almodovar and the final titles in “Kika”) alternately chasing two vehicles. The cool shining auto with sleek doctor Mario Tirelli at the wheel (Pier Francesco Favino) moves along the streets of Rome. The doctor has a leather attache-case. The coughing motorcycle of doctor Luca (Stefano Accorsi) travels along African roads. The greasy doctor has a UNISEF bag over his shoulder. The doctors are around 40 years old. Once they were fellow students, courted one and the same girl, but the girl chose the one that seemed more promising and 12 years ago they went their separate ways. Now in his own flat even when he is most high-strung, he can’t smoke a good cigar without being nagged – the girl has grown into a vegetarian bent on cleanliness and a healthy way of life. Doctor Luca smokes whenever he pleases, almost in the presence of women in labor. Doctor Mario packs a fur hat and gloves into his suitcase and flies to the African village to meet doctor Luca. Some time later the local plane will bring their common fastidious acquaintance to the same backwater. As the laws of comedy demand, pretty soon the fstidious girl will eat a stake prepared from the meat of the cow, which her friends slaughtered virtually before her very eyes; under the blazing sun the disheveled, dead drunk doctor Mario will curse his entire life, in savory and melodious Italian interspersing his speech with hilarious “testa di homosecco”, while the most aloof and wild Negro boy, perched on his knee, will sympathetically examine him with a stethoscope.
It is a comedy which can be compared to “L'africain” by Philippe de Broca, still the warmly remembered by the viewers of the mid-80s movie.

Essentially the same conflict, the same goofy African texture spanning from side to side of the wide screen, the same rickety planes, the flights and landings of which are accomplished to superb film music (in general in “La vita facile” the music is used very thoughtfully and to the point). Most certainly none of the present-day European actors in their early forties, no matter how talented they are, could boast of the same legendary film reputation as Deneuve and Noiret at the time of “L'africain”. The cinema is different and the times are different. Nevertheless Favino exudes the 220 volts of the charm of the robust and somewhat lost Italian male and mother’s boy simultaneously. Accorsi, who shared the screen time with him in such hits of the Apennines of the new age as “The last Kiss” and “Romanzo criminale” is cast against type to say the least. Some three or four insanely funny episodes do not overshadow the general lyrical intonation, although the adventurist overtones found in the new movie as well, have a very different function.

Should someone ask the question what is such a comedy, light as the life mentioned in the title, doing in the competition of the A-class international film festival, the answer will be simple: its recipe has long been lost while its significance has grown. Just think of it: what do they show on TV more often - “L'africain” or “The Legend of Narayama” which won the Palme d’Or the same year? And there will be no more questions.
Besides the Moscow Festival of the Soviet epoch did not treat comedies condescendingly. While the West indulged in now partially forgotten and far less relevant “waves”, it awarded prizes to “Serafino” (Italy) and “Mimino” (USSR), “Le Corniaud” (France) and “The Great Race” (USA), «Operazione San Gennaro» (Italy) and «Das Spukschlob Im Spessart» (FRG) which are still familiar even to schoolchildren. But this is a theme for a special discussion.

Alexey Vasiliev