Pokaz filmów From Russia with What?

Short films are a difficult format for a selector – thousands of them are made every year and most of them really suck. This is a very well known phenomenon in every country, and there is no point in obsessing over it. But, no matter how desperate it might feel at times, it’s very important not to lose your faith in the short film format and keep digging, because in the selection process you always end up with a few great short films that stay with you for a long time and make you proud that you discovered them or maybe they discovered you – it’s just the matter of an angle.

Our festival is called Message to Man, but we don’t think about its name so much. Yet, it seems like the name works anyway, because every film is a message of some sort, even if it doesn’t have one.

We are not looking for ‘funny’ films, or films with political agenda, we don’t care about the budgets and so called ‘quality’. What we are looking for, are an original idea, style and sincerity, because if you have these three ingredients, the rest is not so important. But if you are missing just one – you don’t have anything.

Russian cinema has been a bit disoriented over the last 25 years since Perestroika and the fall of the USSR. Too much has changed in our huge, wild, intolerant, hard drinking and unstable country, and yet too little. Too fast, but too slow. The present, the future and the past change at the same speed these days, and sometimes it’s hard to tell one from another. I guess, on some level our program reflects some of that, even though it wasn’t our idea.

In this guest show at Zubroffka film festival we want to present a few short films that took part in Message to Man in the last three years, without any special ‘concept’. Of course, one might say that not having a concept is also a concept, but life is complicated enough as it is, don’t you agree?”

Programme:

The Log, reż./dir. Alexei Romanov, 2012, 12’

Draft, reż./dir. Timofei Zhalnin, 2010, 19’

The Wound, reż./dir. Anna Budanova, 2013, 9’

Inside Square circle, reż./dir. Valery Shevchenko, 2011, 26’

Chiziki, reż./dir. Nikita Ikonnikov, 15’