August 22, 9:30 pm
The screening of the three winning films of the Short Film competition, selected by the international jury, as well as three films by the Russian participants. The winners will be announced later.объявлены позднее.
News from the Other World, 2020, Russia, 28 min. Director Valentina Bek
The Mamleev family portrait, set in the cramped interior of a small Moscow flat, is an experiment in metaphysical documentary making. Yury Mamleev, the great writer of the Russian chthonic, plays with a cat while his wife, the translator Maria Mamleeva, flips through a photo album from their émigré years in Paris and America. But something eerie seeps into these scenes of simple comfort, vaguely manifesting itself in the elliptical editing and the soundtrack’s unsettling, abstract humming.
Naked, 2019, Russia, 15 min. Director Kirill Khachaturov
The film takes place somewhere in Eastern Europe. Following an accident in a secret laboratory, the main character acquires superpowers that he doesn’t actually need: he doesn’t want to save the world, nor is he interested in fighting supervillains. All he desires is to be left alone. Kirill Khachaturov recreates an awkward, angular landscape of Russian modernity using his very own animation technique – photographic backdrops and crude 3D animation.
Leave of Absence, 2019, Russia, 12 min. Director Anton Sazonov
Russia in the 2010s. Artem, a man of few words (and whose name we learn only in the final credits), lives with a family he doesn’t love, works at a meat plant and spends his evenings watching news of Russia’s military successes in Syria. Anton Sazonov's directorial debut is an aesthete’s study of life in Russia's tower blocks and an attempted existential exploration of Russian masculinity (and the so-called “deep nation”) in crisis.
The films are shown in the original language with Russian subtitles and wireless headphones.
Please register in advance (link in Russian).
New Holland Island International Debut Film Festival is a platform for new and daring cinema, whose mission is to support original and distinctive creative statements and inscribe new names into the international context. The festival is organised by the team of the New Holland: Cultural Urbanization project.
