July 4–7
For the fifth year running, the international Beat Film Festival of documentary film-making and new culture will be holding open-air screenings of selected works from its main progamme on New Holland Island. The Beat Film Fesitval is one of the largest film festivals in Russia, a major cultural event showcasing powerful documentary films covering real developments in the world of music, contemporary art, the media, street culture, sport and new technology to the general public. The festival’s mission is to shape the cultural agenda and to present documentary film-making as a new genre and pastime for the wider public.
Films will be screened in their original language with Russian subtitles
July 4, 7:30 PM
PJ Harvey: A Dog Called Money
The film will be presented by Beat Film Festival founders and curators Alyona Bocharova and Kirill Sorokin.
Writer and musician PJ Harvey and award-winning photographer Seamus Murphy hatched a collaboration — seeking first-hand experience of the countries she wanted to write about, Harvey accompanied Murphy on some of his worldwide reporting trips, joining him in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Washington DC. Harvey collected words, Murphy collected images. Back home, the words become poems, songs, then an album, which is recorded in an unprecedented art experiment in Somerset House, London. In a specially constructed room behind one-way glass, the public — all cameras surrendered — are invited to watch the 5 week process as a live sound-sculpture. Murphy exclusively documents the experiment with the same forensic vision and private access as their travels. By capturing the immediacy of their encounters with the people and places they visited, Murphy shows the humanity at the heart of the work, tracing the sources of the songs, their special metamorphosis into recorded music, and ultimately, cinema.
Seamus Murphy, 2019, Ireland, UK, 90 min.
Free entry.
July 5, 7:30 PM
Bauhaus Spirit
The screening is cancelled due to rain. The new date of screening will be announced later.
The film will be presented by art and architecture historian Ksenia Malich.
The film portrays the exciting history of Bauhaus as the formulation, the failure and the renewal of a utopia for society. But it also presents current social, conceptual and artistic projects and relates them to the history of Bauhaus. The film uses this frame of a huge, visionary project to ask the questions that matter today: how do we want to live, where do we want to go from here?
Niels Bolbrinker and Thomas Tielsch, 2018, Germany, UK, 95 min.
Free entry.
July 6, 8 PM
David Bowie: Finding Fame
The film will be presented by the Chief Editor of Séance magazine Vassily Stepanov
This is the David Bowie story you don’t know. The story of how David Robert Jones became David Bowie, how David Bowie became Ziggy Stardust and how Ziggy became immortal, changing the musical landscape as he did so. The story that finally makes sense of one of the greatest icons of the 20th and 21st centuries. Part three of Francis Whately’s Bowie trilogy.
Francis Whately, 2019, UK, 91 min.
The film will be screened as a part of The Longest Table charity event programme. Admission fee: adults — 500 roubles, Concessions — 250 roubles, children under 13 — free.
July 7, 7:30 PM
Rams
The film will be presented by designer and archictect Sergey Helmyanov.
Rams is a documentary portrait of Dieter Rams, one of the most influential designers alive, and a rumination on consumerism, sustainability, and the future of design.
Gary Hustwit, 2018, USA, 74 min.
Free entry.
