Film festivals

International festival of contemporary cinema: painted pigeons, air sellers, gays and clones returning home

Continuing the topic festival (see the previous issue on Cannes and Oscar), let’s talk about the great 2morrow/Zavtra international film competition of modern cinema. The festival has an aura of bold youth, red-cheeked curiosity and a fresh, European simplicity.

This year its program – contrary to European film aesthetic templates of the noughties - is free of surrealistic director’s big talk, nasty torn naturalism and someone else’s hopeless pain, but at that (what a cheek!) it really claims to call the unhealthy public for changes.

For example, Tales from the Golden Age are all like that. One would think that nobody could savour the details of post-soviet past with as much gusto as Pavel Lungin in Taxi-blues, and nobody could put on a carefree spectacle based on the shambles of his country’s past – awfully funny and with a taste of bitterness at the same time – like Emir Kusturica did almost 10 times in a row. Here you are – a collection of 5 scintillating legends of Romanian life under the totalitarian government of Nicolae Ceauşescu (that period was nicknamed as Golden Age by the propaganda) by 5 absolutely unknown-to-anybody Romanian cinema surnames.

The Legend of the Official Visit by Hanno H a village gets ready for the arrival of the S Party orders everything to be impeccable, wh out absurd. They plan to let snow-white pigfl but where to get them? The scared village: from somebody they confiscate a cage v one else — just hatched chickens. The Par and has them catch common pigeons an< they think how to make the view window more attractive. It is in sprin the villagers were ordered to buy a to clean the roads of cow pies an and bells. The Secretary General decided to post children with fl poems and shout 'hooray!' am by turn. A boy with sticking is swapped with a girl with (pecially the Party members give the appearance of a di there is a call that the Secri - If that is so, let's all go to the merry-go-round! – offers the local head of the Party to the chairmen of the village, pointing to the merry-go-round that was planned to be unveiled especially for the arrival of the Secretary General. The heads of the village are quite aged people, some of whom have heart problems. But an order is an order – one and all climb on the marry-go-round. And it happens that there is nobody to turn it off. So they ride it till morning and miss the call that the Secretary General changes his plans and is on his way to the village.

In The Legend of the party Photographer by Razvan Marculescu, the newspaper management can not make up their minds as to hoe to present the meeting of Ceauşescu with President of the French Republic Giscard d'Estaing. The problem is as follows: in the only photo of the meet­ing Ceausescu firstly is significantly shorter than his French col­league and secondly he isn't wearing a hat, which, in the opinion of the Party leadership, could be understood as a gesture of taking off their hat to France, and that is absolutely inappropriate. The photographer was made to literally (because they didn't know any special photo programs and devices at that time) raise Ceausescu firstly, and then to add a hat to his head. With a sense of having done their duty the picture is published. The next day it turned out that having put the hat on Ceausescu they forgot to take away the one he's holding in his hands...

In The Legend of the Air Sellers by Constantin Popescu, young people decide to earn money from returning empty bottles. In order to collect them in particularly big quantities, they intro­duce themselves to households as representatives of the Sanitation Center who allegedly received a complaint about foul air on the premises. For laboratory research they need to take an air sample from each apartment and it's exceedingly convenient to transport it in a common glass bottle...

Warning for those who was younger than 10 years old at the mo ment of the breakup of the Soviet Union: watching the movie re­quires the accompaniment of your parents in order to avoid dis­trust of the fact that the plots of Tales from Ik- Golden Age are 100% documental.

The film-discovery of 2010 2morrow Cinema Festival was a hipster movie of 21 year-old (!!) Canadian director Xavier Dolan, who al ready grabbed his first place at the same festival last year for / Killed My Mother Q'at I lie ma mire). This time the Canadian brought a love triangle story - Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires): a gay rivals his closest girlfriend for a cute curly-headed blond's favour. \a vier Dolan apparently is a frequent user of social networks where he keeps an internet photo-album named 'Things I love' (specifi cally 'Those who 1 try to be like with all might'), where porcelain dolls smoke provocatively unladylike cigarettes and men in white tight-fitting shirts with undone buttons die in languid bliss. He printed out the photos and made a kind of cinema comics where you shouldn't find any hidden Freudian psychological analysis, any moral, any implications. Because here it is - not a movie but a Vogue magazine, and you shouldn't watch it, you should examine it! And Dolan never missed on the aesthetic of yisual design: all is yummy, stylish, with a European feel, and you want the smell of glossy pages to linger and to turn it inadvertently into a TV series.

The festival program also offered a completely unusual plot by |apanese director Kanji Nakajima - The Clone Returns Home,

about an astronaut who, before Hying to a space station, agreed to mould his body and memories for scientists to recreate him in cast of an accident. All in all, alter an accident the produced clone of the deceased astronaut was plunged into the traumatic memories of his childhood that his prototype shunned in every possible way. Also a film by Ukrainian director Alexander Shapiro Dnepr was spotted in the European competition. 1 didn't have the opportu­nity to appreciate it, however it would be unpatriotic not to men tion it here.

Do you think that the young festivals are able to impartially cover the incipient tendencies ol 21^s' century filmmaking? Or only tradi­tional Oscars and Palmes d'Or can be trusted?

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