Garage Screen Film Festival

August 2–5

In the year of its tenth anniversary, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art will show the best films about art and modern culture during Garage Screen Film Festival on New Holland Island. The section Cinema in Space and Time is a compilation of modern experimental cinema containing nine films. Viewers will be introduced to statements by authors on acute public topics as well as to reflections on the nature of art, including a poetical video essay El Mar La Mar about the experience of a long stay in a desert; a documentary chronicle Austerlitz by Sergei Loznitsa about the possibility of preserving the memory of the Holocaust tragedy in the Nazi concentration camps turned into museums; Dawson City: Frozen Time by Bill Morrison, in which a story about the Gold Rush is intertwined with the history of cinematography.

The festival will also introduce the public to the works of Russian video artists filmed in the recent years.  The works of Eugene Granilshchikov, Polina Kanis, and the groups Provmyz and Free Space combine an analytical approach to the video image, a distinctive mark of contemporary art, with cinematic imagery.

The festival will be supported by the Garage Museum’s partner—UNIQLO. 

Films are screened in their original language with Russian subtitles. Free admission.

August 2, 7 PM

HyperNormalisation

Basing his findings on an extensive analysis of political, economic and technological history worldwide since 1975, the British documentary film-maker Adam Curtis reaches the conclusion that the current global political situation is reminiscent of the ideological plight of the USSR in its last years, where change seems impossible even when the flaws and deficiencies in the political and economic system are so obvious.

Directed by Adam Curtis. UK, 2016. 166 min. 16+

August 3, 8 PM

El Mar la Mar

One of the most outstanding pieces of experimental cinema of 2017, and shot at the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Laboratory, the film tells the story of people who were prepared to risk their lives for a better future, and spend seven days in the Sonoran Desert. Seven days is the length of the journey under the scorching sun from Mexico to the USA – the first step for the new wave of illegal immigrants.

Directed by J.P. Sniadecki, Joshua Bonnetta. USA. 2017. 94 min. 12+

August 4, 8 PM

Dawson City: Frozen time

A journey into the past, based on the materials of a unique film archive in the town of Dawson City in North-West Canada, where hundreds of silent films made during the period of the gold rush have been miraculously preserved.

Directed by Bill Morrison. USA, 2016. 120 min. 6+

August 5, 8 PM

Austerlitz

A documentary chronicle by Sergei Loznitsa, filmed in former Nazi concentration camps which have been turned into museums.

Directed by Sergei Loznitsa. Germany, 2016. 94 min. 12+

August 4–5, 12 PM – 9 PM, Pavillion

To Follow Her Advice

Evgeny Granilshchikov's film presents the author's cinematographically vivid introspections on the recent political situation in Russia. Scenes shot in Moscow and Thailand collide in a free-associative and emotionally-charged montage, to impart to the viewer a sense of the lack of confidence in the future felt by the director’s generation.

Directed by Evgeny Granilshchikov. Russia, 2016. 31 min. 18+

The Pool

The Pool is a figurative image of a flowing, yet trapped water space, conjuring up the feeling of frozen time. The Pool is at once a refuge and a waiting area, into which the film’s characters are immersed.

Director: Polina Kanis. Russia, 2015. 10 min. 18+

The Shift

The workers at a closed institution are engrossed in carrying out their routine responsibilities, however here the men and women are intentionally set against one another. The women occupy the position of privilege, in management positions, casually dressed in only their underwear and paying little or no attention to the men, dressed in sack-cloth and spend their time cleaning, waiting tables in the cafeteria and doing all manner of other manual labour. The film’s title refers both to the change in gender roles in society, and to the working period at a factory.

Directed by Polina Kanis. Russia, 2016. 28 min. 18+

Canons and Eves

A film made through the combined efforts of the Provmyza art group (Sergey Provodov and Galina Myznikova) and their students, young artists from the Free Spaces group. Their film is an unique visual anthropological study, in which the language of cinema, in this sense in its most emotional forms, rich with hidden meanings, is analysed together with a vast concatenation of other concepts in social culture.

Directed by the Provmyza art-group and the Free Spaces project. Russia, 2015–2017. 40 min. 16+