ARTCORE

This year the festival section of films about arts will be introduced by Sergey Uvarov’s “Seeking Harmony” which was created in the Moscow Conservatoire. The film addresses experiments in music, the search for new sound forms capable of expressing the social and ecological situations.

“Open-Pit” by Felipe Esparza P?rez takes us into the complicated world of the father who is a quarry worker and the son, a photographer, who have severed communication following a family tragedy. The open skies – the epitron in the catholic cathedral and the blue over the quarry – become the spot for the silent encounter of the protagonists.

The Vietnamese “Memoryland” directed by Kim Quy Bui looks at the borderline between life and death from the artistic cultural angle while the Indian debut by Indhu V S “19(1)(a)”, based on real events, turns to aspects of political culture, taking as an example the tragic fate of the writer who fell victim to official collisions. Both movies were shot by young female directors who are just beginning their film career.

The thread of films dealing with the interaction of politics and arts is continued by the Argentinian documentary “Chronicles of an Exile” co-directed by Micaela Montes Rojas and Pablo Guallar. The film carries us over into the difficult period of the 1970’s. In Latin America the protagonist Octavio Getino together with the director Fernando Solanas release the famous four-hour documentary “The Hour of the Furnaces”. Following Isabel Per?n’s rise to power Octavio Getino had to leave the country and for more than ten years taught a course of film theory in the capital of Peru. It was only after the end of the “dirty war” that he was able to reunite with his family. The story is told through photos, archival footage and audio recordings of the protagonist. Our journey through the world of artistic culture will be concluded by a peculiar experimental movie “Kyoko. The Dream Harvest Season” by Hamid Benamra, a French director of Algerian origins shot as a cross between live-action and documentary cinema. It opens with a dedication to the long-standing program director of the MIFF Kirill Razlogov.

Nina Kochelyaeva