VIVA LIFE!
The Russian cinema program at the Moscow International Film Festival does not merely offer a panorama of its present state, it provides, so to speak, a formula of its condition at the moment, its detailed, full-fledged portrait.
The panorama of new Russian cinema still bears the title «Russia, which we regained» and probably for the first time in recent years the name reflects the real state of affairs in our national cinema. First of all it is because during the past year alone our cinema knew radical renewal. Even a casual glance will tell you that almost half of the new national movies are directorial debuts. The wails of critics, that at the time of the growing commercialization of cinema a first-timer will never make his way to the big screen, shattered against the business acumen and energetic professionalism of many contemporary young (or not so young) people, who chose to make feature-length movies.
It is the clear-cut understanding of one?s goals that stands out in the mighty wave of cinematic debuts. The desire to kill two birds with one stone — to cause the viewers to bring money to the box-office, to make the critics like the picture and the elite festivals invite it — is no longer to be found in the works of first-time directors. Most certainly things can happen: a commercial project can arouse the interest of critics and festival selection committees, or on the contrary the director of a film d?auteur can become the focus of the audience?s attention. That is a happy occurrence, but in no way an attempt to reconcile mainstream with language experiments.
The program includes movies definitely intended for the cinefiles and festival audiences, shot in a tough almost documentary style with elements of excessively detailed naturalism («The Last Train» by Alexei German Jr) as well as those that can be called fundamentally «bourgeois» with glossy picture, extravagant costumes and targeted at solvent viewers («The Recipe of Sorceress» by Tatiana Voronetskaya). Finally our cinema has found a Robert Rodriguez in the person of Timur Bekmambetov who carried on the tradition of national vampire pictures with the movie «Night Watch». But such extremities are rare.
Contemporary directors take a ready interest in the world of teenagers, attractive or not too handsome, whose life went to pieces at an early age. Such movies as «Papillon?s Playing» by Andrei Proshkin, «Shiza» by Gulshad Omarova, «Masha» by Sergei Tkachev depict the internals of teenage life. Though each movie proposes to the characters its own «light at the end of the tunnel» instead of an impasse. A way out or a choice. We are not reminded of the soothing stories assuring you that everything is bound to be OK. The confidence that «misfortune is not the crack of doom» is exactly what helps the young man to survive in a disaster and to live on. The share of this young beneficial optimism is growing in our cinema.
Even the abundant retro brings us back to the same topic. The popular actor Vladimir Mashkov in his directorial debut «Papa» after Alexander Galich?s «Matrosskaya Tishina» tells the story about the coming of age of a young man, who lived in a different epoch.
The first-time big-screen director Alexander Veledinsky made a movie based on Eduard Limonov?s old novels which constitute the so called Kharkov trilogy («Young Scoundrel», «Teenager Savenko» and «We had a great epoch»). Veledinsky himself defines the genre of the movie as «tragicomedy or vice versa comic tragedy, when first you laugh and then you are scared as is always the case here, in Russia. It is rather a movie about the Russian character, about good and evil coexisting within the soul of one person and feeding each other».
Are we really drifting away from mounds of corpses in the closing episodes of movies or is it just a coincidence this year? One way or the other, it is the movies about young people, included in this year?s Russian panorama, that are totally in sync with the slogan and title of the program: «Russia, which we regained». Or at least are starting to regain. This is the reason for bringing young people back on screen and challenging him with the question: «How shall I live?»
On the whole it was a «fruitful» year. Gurus of different generations who had kept silent for a long time as though agreed to shower upon the cinefiles a whole series of movies very different from one another.
The venerable Rustam Ibragimbekov and Roman Balayan told a very lyrical and humorous story about the asylum for deaf, dumb and blind youths. There, despite total isolation from the world of children, Shakespearean passions rage, fantastic love stories unroll, amazing transformation of «chrysalises» into «butterflies» take place.
As everyone knows, after «Gambrinus» Dmitry Meskhiev makes movies only about the time he remembers personally, but still he made a movie not about war, but about life. When a person is forced to exist on the brink of life and death, he starts demonstrating qualities he never suspected in himself, begins doing things he would have believed impossible…
In the movie «About Love» Sergei Solovyov, whose credo is to be eclectic, chose «to test harmony with algebra», i.e. he tries the durability of Chekhov (and Chekhov passes the test).
Sergei Ursulyak adapted for the screen one of Yuri Trifonov?s most excruciating works («Long Farewell»). The movie returns us into the not so distant past and its closeness underlines the depth of the chasm separating the man of today from the man of the middle of the 20th century, the man of today from this very man twenty years prior…
In his movie «72 meters» Vladimir Khotinenko tries to bring back to the screen the notion of patriotism which for a long time was almost equivalent to a swearword. The story of the death of the submarine is not the director?s primary concern. What matters is the people who perished on board the ship and that is why the stories of their lives are more vivid and more important than their almost accidental death…
On the whole the Russian program at the XXVI MIFF is an evidence not so much of the external, quantitative changes in our cinema as of internal processes within it and first of all the human attempt to give a meaning to himself and the world he lives in. It would be absurd to say that all these movies are masterpieces. But still the main conclusion of the current cinematic year is the return to the screen of the polyphony of the world, stylistic and language complexity, the search for the «addressee» in the movie hall.
The Russian section of the festival includes an impressive block of new documentaries among which are the truly unique ones like «Passion for Marina» by Odelsha Agishev and Andrei Osipov, «I Died in Childhood…» by Georgy Paradjanov, «Georgy Rerberg. Rejected ‘Stalker? of Tarkovsky» by Marina Dubrovina. The tendency to make portrait movies seems to be a distinctive feature of the present cinematic year. Though those are not customary ceremonial portraits. Those are the stories of great people in tragic circumstances. If you like, it is an attempt to let the deceased geniuses say something not previously heard by contemporaries.

New Russian animation gradually restores its former status. It is not so much the question of mastery (it was there even during the hardest years) as of universal nature. Past is the time when our animation existed only in the festival coordinates, when the serious notion of animation totally eliminated the well-known childish word «cartoon». Today animation is back and not only for the high-brow intellectuals but for children as well, not only for the sake of life philosophy but for fun and joy (which does not eliminate philosophy!). The emergence of a large number of debutants in animation gives us hope of new developments, while the standards set by the classics makes newcomers search for subjects, language, genre and style peculiarities that would allow their movies to coexist with the works of the masters, probably not as equals but at least within the same artistic space.

Retrospectives include ten mute movies by Yakov Protazanov. Today when almost every artist, starting a new project, is intently looking for the formula of success with the public, our offer of the retrospective of the king of Russian commercial cinema, who knew how to turn even an advertisement into an unbearably funny comedy, is fraught with hidden meaning. Protazanov, who knew the secret of the viewers? hearts, was endowed with a phenomenal sense of genre and at the same time was a master of expressive detail, vivid portrait, brilliant «constructor» of fascinating story. Even today almost a hundred years later he can suggest to the contemporary director where to look for the «formula of success».

The retrospective «VGIK: Border of the centuries» is devoted to the 85th anniversary of the institute of cinema and offers the audience the best movies shot by the students at the end of the past century and at the beginning of the present. We hope the audience will discern the look of Russian cinema of tomorrow (though today some of those student authors already belong to the team of masters).

The short program «Non-finished films» lets us see masterpieces that were left incomplete for tragic reasons. They are «Agnus Dei» by Semyon Aranovich and «The River» by Alexei Balabanov. In a way it is an attempt to right the historical wrongs when tragic events forever conceal from the viewer a new milestone in the biography of the artist. The proof of our point of view might be that the retrospective should have been one picture longer, but the striking footage for Dinara Asanova?s movie «The Unknown Lady» written by Yuri Klepikov was nowhere to be found. It was kept by Lyudmila Krivitskaya, Dinara Asanova?s constant second director. After Krivitskaya?s death there was no one left who knew or remembered where it was kept.

All in all within the framework of the Russian program of the Moscow Festival 103 movies will be screened. We hope they will not merely tell the audience about our present-day cinema and its past but will let the attentive viewer accurately discover Russia, wich we regained.

Irina Pavlova
Art director of Russian programs of XXVI Moscow Film Festival