Film festival fusion

Film festival fusion

This year’s Kinoforum unites four different film events. Sept. 13 will see the fourth

Published: September 12, 2012 (Issue # 1726)


FOR SPT

The Kinoforum will feature a retrospective of Emir Kusturica films.

The much-loved Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica will preside over the jury at the first St. Petersburg International Film Festival that kicks off on Sept. 21 as part of the Third St. Petersburg Kinoforum.

The festival’s competition program features 14 films by established European directors such as Mika Kaurismaki (Finland) and Alexei Balabanov (Russia) as well as up-and-coming talent from far beyond Europe.

Balabanov will present his latest film, “Me Too,” which has just had its world premiere at the 69th International Film Festival in Venice. The film portrays a motley crew of characters traveling around the Russian provinces searching for the mysterious Bell Tower of Happiness that performs miracles and ensures people’s lives take a turn for the better.

The Kinoforum has completely changed its management and structure since last year. Gone are the filmmakers Alexei German and Alexander Sokurov, whose ideas defined last year’s event. Instead, the Kinoforum has turned into an umbrella brand for four different film events, including the international film festival and three already established local events: The Message to Man festival of short and documentary films, The Beginning festival of student works and Vivat, Russian Cinema! festival of Russian films.

The philosophy of the festival does, however, follow in the footsteps of the previous edition of the event. While German promised in 2011 that the festival would serve as “a charger for the soul,” this time around, Kirsi Tykkylainen, the program director of the international film festival, said the core principle for selecting the films was that they “touched the soul.”

Maria Averbakh, director of the international film festival, said she was proud of the fact that the program of her event boasts the works of filmmakers from countries that are not yet recognized international film Meccas, yet showcase extraordinary productions.

All the films will have their Russian premieres at the festival.

“I am sure that the film ‘Inside’ by the Turkish director Zeki Demikubuz that is loosely based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Notes From the Underground” will generate a genuine interest,” Averbakh said.

“Profoundly disturbing and fiercely personal, the kind of film that attempts to grab its audience by the throat and never let go until the last second, Demirkubuz’ latest opus offers such a bleak, uncompromisingly dark portrait of man at war with himself, that many people will balk at its sight,” wrote Dan Fainaru in a recent review of the film for the www.screendaily.com portal.

“The main character, Muharrem (Engin Gunaydin), a self-hating paranoiac, passive-aggressive, disturbed to the brink of insanity, jealous of the entire world and out to take his revenge on evils he was done or imagines to have suffered, while at the same time intentionally dragging himself through the mire, is not only a fair and square representation of Dostoyevsky’s short novel’s hero, but deploys on screen a scary image of human nature as a battlefield between psychotic emotions, fear, envy, aggression, cowardice, sexual insecurities and frustrations, abject solitude and a desperate need for an identity, to mention just a few of Muharrem’s problems,” Fainaru concluded.

The festival’s program director Tykkylainen was keen to stress that while every international film festival strives to reach as far as possible in its quest for filming and acting talent, it is important not to overlook talent close to the event’s location.

“I understand the interest in various exotic things, but I would like to remind you that a wealth of most exciting and thrilling things are happening just round the corner,” she said.

“For example, the Latvian director Juris Poskus has made an absolutely overwhelming film “Kolka Cool,” while my compatriot, Mika Kaurismaki, made a very human movie, “Road to the North,” that has already become very successful in Finland, about the relationships between men in a family, the responsibility of a father. Many people in my country feel very close to the topic and the director’s attitude. I am interested in what sort of reaction it will produce in Russia.”

The festival’s Grand Prix is shaped in the form of the golden angel that graces the top of the spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Prizes will be awarded for the best film as well as to the best actor and actress. The audiences will also be able to award their own prizes.

Joining Kusturica on the jury will be the Russian producer Yelena Yatsura, as well as Erika Gregor, the co-founder of the Forum of New Cinema at the Berlinale International Film Festival, Finnish filmmaker Aku Louhimies and Gilli Mendel, director of film and media education at the Jerusalem Film Center, the Israel Film Archive and the Jerusalem International film festival.

Gregor and her husband Ulrich are also organizing a retrospective of the most outstanding works showcased at the Forum of New Cinema from 1958 through 2011. All of the films will enjoy their Russian premieres. Kusturica fans will be cheered by a retrospective of his works, including his first three films, which have never been shown in Russia.

“These films, which are stylistically very different from the Kusturica that all of us are so used to, were filmed in the former Yugoslavia, which made it very difficult and time-consuming for us to secure the rights to show them in Russia,” Averbakh explained. “It took ages to find all the owners of the rights to these films.”

Lenfilm, Russia’s oldest film studio, will be honored with a special retrospective too, and the films that have been selected have all had a hard life, having either been shelved for decades or been the subject of a fierce battle before being shown to audiences.

“What we would like our festival to offer is a diversity of angles in addition to the diversity of talent,” Averbakh said.

The Kinoforum runs through Sept. 29. For more information,

see www.kinoforumspb.ru.

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