Translated material
We'll do it ourselves
Children's Film Festival "Artek" has started a new business
The Artek children's and youth film festival in the Ukrainian children's center of the same name (formerly the famous Soviet pioneer camp) changed its formula in its eighteenth year. It broke the usual pattern with its competitive display and distribution of prizes. The film program, of course, was not cancelled. But diversity was introduced into the festival life scheme.The scheme was sad, it's true. And Artek is not an exception to the rule, but a typical representative. For the vast majority of our domestic festivals, the competition is a screen decoration behind which the organizers innocently hide their desire to hold a cultural event for their own joy and within the framework of existing decency. And at the same time, give the opportunity to good people of retirement age, who at one time worked gloriously for the benefit of the national cinematic art, to bask on the beach (if it happens in the south) or just have a drink and a hearty snack (if the events take place to the north).
Such festivals, of course, perform a therapeutic social function. For middle-aged people living in the outback and deprived of the attention of the capital, it is sometimes pleasant to catch with their eyes the wave of the hand of an idol of the same age, walking alive along the starry path. And if you’re lucky, you’ll get to take a photo together as a souvenir. They remember us, which means they don’t forget. The cinematic landing force is landing.
At children's festivals it all looks a little different. Because children, let’s be honest, don’t know their grandmothers’ youth idols and hardly want to know them. This applies to guests. With the competition, everything is also simple: prizes and victories mean nothing almost everywhere. Even if the jury acts honestly and independently, and does not dutifully carry out the instructions of the organizers. In any case, all these “golden bast shoes”, “silver mimosas” and “bronze hamsters” have nothing to do with the workshop hierarchy, but rather harmless souvenirs for the film, for your contribution, for beautiful eyes, for not being lazy come to us, and we are glad.
In Artek there is no adult jury, there are two children’s ones: large and small. The grand jury is three and a half thousand children who watch competitive films in different camps and then vote for the best (among adults this is usually called the “audience award”). And the small jury is selected children delegated for intellectual or some other abilities and awarding various awards with terrifying wording like “the kindest film”, “the most wonderful film”, etc.
Imagine, however, that the teenagers who came for a Black Sea vacation (sane, from normal families - trips here can cost several thousand dollars per shift) unanimously preferred the ordinary telemovie “Hello, Kinder!” I can’t make it to the Oscar-winning animated film “Wally,” as happened last summer, even if I wanted to. It’s funny that a super-successful cartoon, which won the world’s main statuette, actually got into the local competition, but its fiasco is not even funny. Is it like the Crimean sun must burn out the brains of children for them to blurt out such things? Or how disrespected they must be to blurt out such a thing for them. Nevertheless, Kinder, which was produced by Channel One for its Sunday household needs, was, without shame, called the best film of the competition by the mouths of babies and teenagers. Apparently, in order to please the person of the above-mentioned channel, Ekaterina Strizhenova, who, on one-time terms, agreed to fulfill the duties of the festival president.
This year they decided to restructure the film screening program. As you know, we have almost no children's films. Not good at all. And then who should we invite to compete? Disney cartoons with each other? They can do it at home or in global cinemas.
Films that would be equally attractive to very small and almost large ones are even more rare. The situation is somewhat easier with those films listed under the “youth” department. The heroes of our new movie are mostly young people. You certainly can’t make fifteen-year-old Artek residents blush with an innocent kiss or an incriminating and therefore direct and sharp shot of a drug injection. To groan and close their eyes is typical hypocrisy. Therefore, the festival decided to focus the competition on youth films so that the oldest judges would judge them. The competition included eight very different films: the social drama “The Migrant”, the animated “First Squad”, the documentary “Kids” and five stories with a melodramatic design inside and different external lighting - Soviet military (“Not Now”), Soviet post-war (“From the Back Door”), Soviet stagnant (“House of the Sun”), Russian macabre-elegiac (“Odnoklassniki”) and almost blackish Kazakh (“999”). And for the little ones, without any competition, they brought new films “The Legend of the Island of Dvid” and “Adventures in the Thirtieth Kingdom”, as well as the mentioned Disney products.
But nothing came of the selection venture: despite the agreement reached, the camp authorities stubbornly brought all the children indiscriminately to the competitive screenings. As a result, the kids were bored by "The Migrant" and perplexed by "Odnoklassniki" - raping them with this movie was as pointless as feeding mustachioed boys of high school age and their even faster matured peers with "The Princess and the Frog" or "Rudy the Hound Pig" "
In general, a revolution in the Artek film exhibition did not happen, but it happened next door thanks to the efforts of the most militant actress of our time and mother of three children, Ekaterina Volkova, whom the general director of the festival and also a mother of three children, Victoria Lukina, bravely invited to become the artistic director this year.
Volkova came up with the idea of combining film screening with film production. So that in the evenings children watch other people's films, and during the day they make their own with adults. Having collaborated with Andrei Popov, artistic director of the Peace Shop laboratory, she composed the project “Seven”. Over seven festival days, seven film crews of seven people each had to come up with seven short stories and make seven-minute films based on them on the theme “seven-me”.
A good group of adults responded to the call to participate in the work. Among the screenwriters who invented stories with the children were Vadim Levanov and Vyacheslav Durnenkov. Among the directors are Sonya Karpunina from Odnoklassniki and the aforementioned Volkova and Popov. Back in Moscow, the project was verbally supported by Fyodor Bondarchuk, Oksana Fandera and Ksenia Sobchak, but this time they were unable to find time. But it worked for Ravshana Kurkova, who did not stay in Karlovy Vary and, together with Artem Tkachenko, flew to Artek for several days. Mikhail Luzin from the group “Casablanca” and “manufacturer” Elena Kaufman composed soundtracks for the films right on the spot. And the main ones were the children, for whose sake everything was started and who, together with the counselors, worked selflessly under the scorching sun. It happened almost until nightfall. Sometimes we got tired. But now they definitely have something to remember from this July shift.
The resulting film almanac is, of course, important, but the main result here is different. Well-known and not yet very well-known young figures in our cinema involved children in a common creative endeavor, and they received their first lessons in cinematic work in communication with them and from their hands. This kind of unifying undertaking is useful from different points of view, no less for adults than for children. Our lack of full-fledged children's cinematography has not only financial and technological reasons. The main reasons live, as always, in our heads. Russian cinema has completely lost contact with those who predominantly fill all the country's cinema halls. With those who make the box office, or don’t go to the cinema and don’t make it. In general, with the same age as those who came to Artek. In this regard, such joint work is also a step towards each other. An attempt to establish “feedback”, to hear the order of those who are mainly worth addressing. Artek also has its own undoubted benefit: Volkov’s creativity pulled it out of the family of beach-party festival endeavors. It would be wise on his part if he seized on this idea and developed it. And it would be stupid if he neglected it. This is even more stupid than dragging older people into fairy tales about a pig, and younger ones into dramas from the lives of twenty-year-olds.