July 27, 7:30 pm
Desert of the Real, directed by Christian von Borries, Germany, 2017
Six years have passed since the collapse of the property market’s financial pyramid, and its glittering architectural ruins are already being reclaimed by nature. Entire suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona are awash with tumbleweed; in post-Soviet Georgia, unfinished resorts rot on the shores of the Black Sea; in Abu Dhabi, palm trees wither and die among half-completed film studios and sports complexes. It is right here that the largest arms fairs in the world take place, with that very same desert providing the backdrop for most of the real and virtual wars of the age. Elsewhere, the new manmade deserts take the form of shopping centres, carbon copies of Venice, but filled with the living dead...
Composer and director Christian von Borries’ new film sets out to explore these modern-day wastelands, opening up the wasteland metaphor to today’s everyday reality in a rich montage of both staged and documentary scenes. At the core of so many holographic simulations and copies in a world specially created for tweets and Instagram selfies, he unearths emptiness and the threat of violence. (David Riff)
Organized jointly with the MIEFF festival
Christian von Borries (Berlin) is a documentary film-maker, director, artist and composer. On completing his studies in Germany, France and the US, he began his career as a solo-flautist for the Zurich Opera, although soon he found a more free-ranging career to be more to his liking. His first film, The Dubai in Me, came out in 2010, taking first place at the FID Marseille festival, and was followed by Mocracy — Neverland in Me (2012), I am M (2013) and Iphonechina (2014). His films and other works have been showcased at numerous film festivals and contemporary art events, including Documenta 12 and the Venice Biennale. Christian von Borries is an anti-copyright campaigner.
MIEFF (the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival) is an international cultural and educational platform, whose principal mission is the study, promotion and support of contemporary film- and video-art, and which aims to form the basis for the development of experimental cinema in Russia. The annual MIEFF festival showcases the diversity of contemporary cinematographic strategies which go beyond the classical cinema aesthetic. www.mieff.com
The film is screened in its original language with subtitles.
Curator: Aleksey Artamonov, film critic.
For participants 18 years and older. Admission is free of charge. The number of participants is limited. Please register in advance.
Hidden, Film Club:
As part of the program, Hidden, film critics and film historians will showcase important films that have, for whatever reasons, remained in the shadows of the official canon, explaining their significance and what makes them extraordinary. But Hidden isn’t limited to the marginal, the forgotten or lost. It also explores the underbelly of films we thought we knew. By choice, the guests of these lectures on films will attempt to uncover these contradictions, leading us down into the depths of the human psyche and political systems, past and present. The speakers of this particular program include: Mikhail Ratgauz, Boris Nelepo, Vasily Koretsky, Mikhail Trofimenkov and many others, including one of Great Britain’s most preeminent film critics, Neil Young, and the renowned German media theorist Thomas Elsaesser. All of the films will be screened with subtitles.
