Translated material
"Contact" in context
The Third International Documentary Film Festival ended in Kyiv
The Contact Documentary Film Festival was founded by the Ministry of Culture, the National Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine, the 1+1 channel and the Larisa Rodnyanskaya Non-Fiction Film Fund with the support of the Molodist Film Festival (and only 100 thousand hryvnia received from the state budget). The task of “Contact” is to introduce Ukrainian documentary filmmakers to the work of their foreign colleagues, to integrate Ukrainian cinema into the global process, and generally to support the existence of documentary cinema as a genre. And this last one is not an easy task, and not only in Ukraine.The chairman of the international jury, the famous British documentarian Paul Watson, said at the opening that today television is attacking so strongly that the art of documentary filmmaking is having a very hard time, it is literally dying under the format of television channels. And Ukrainian professionals behind the scenes added interesting information to this - it turns out that one of the most popular genres for documentaries today are biographical films, which large businessmen order about themselves and their friends. Such paintings are shown at private parties, but their production budget is larger than those financed by the Ministry of Culture.
Perhaps the strong competition from financially wealthy citizens is responsible for the fact that Ukrainian cinema itself was rather poorly represented on “Contact”. Only three films participated in the full-length national competition, two of them also took part in the international one. As a result, the national jury decided not to award the Grand Prix at all, and the prizes in the “long-length” and “short film” categories went to the films “Dissidents” and “Spiral of History.” I admit, I was not able to watch the second film, but the first, filmed by Alexander Frolov and Viktor Shkurin on the “1+1” channel, is just a standard television series (montage of chronicle footage and monologues of participants and eyewitnesses), telling about Ukrainian intellectuals, who fought against Soviet power in the 60s-80s and were part of the Helsinki Group - interesting in material, quite solid and intelligible, but, unfortunately, not outstanding in anything else.
Under the orange sun
The first Contact festival took place in the spring of 2005, immediately after the Orange Revolution. At this time, Kyiv was still in a state of social upsurge, although skeptical moods were no longer uncommon, and the euphoria of victory gave way to discussions and disputes about the future. Films about the Maidan have already appeared, but their authors did not have enough time for comprehension and reflection; they only recorded what was happening with varying degrees of engagement. The third “Contact” came at a time of a new political crisis, and its guests and participants clearly hoped that documentary films would bring some of their own comments and explanations to the changes that had taken place in Ukraine over the past two years. Alas. The Ukrainian documentary films presented at the festival did not seem to notice the changes. And this strangely correlates with what is happening on the streets of the city: green spring Kyiv lives its own life, people walk, drink beer, stand in line at the stadium where the Klitschko brothers' prize fights are taking place, discuss the football championship that was allowed to be held in Ukraine, walk with children in parks. And at the same time, rallies are taking place in the central squares and streets, orange flags are flying somewhere, blue and white flags are flying somewhere (and some new ones have appeared, fuchsia colors), columns of demonstrators are marching, tents are standing near the Mariinsky Palace, shrouded in the heavy spirit of unwashed bodies, the inhabitants of which, however, in their free time from their main work, willingly enjoy good weather and a beautiful view of the Dnieper. Both lives flow in parallel, as if without touching each other.
But this does not become a topic for documentary film.
The only film in the program dedicated to the political life of Ukraine was “Orange Winter” by Andrei Zagdansky, a native of Kyiv living in the USA, who edited a chronicle of the “Orange Revolution”, combining it with fragments of the operas “Boris Godunov” and “La Traviata”, which were then performed in Kyiv, and film "Earth" by Dovzhenko. The author wanted to present his version of the events on the Maidan, immersing them in the context of artistic language and thereby giving them a different perspective. Although in the end the statement turned out to be rather vague, no other attempt was made to comprehend the meaning of the “orange” phenomenon at the festival.
The organizers of Contact, however, obviously sought to create the most complete picture of modern documentary, and the films presented at the festival showed its most varied forms. The program was compiled very carefully, the juxtaposition of films suggested mutual connections between their themes, but such subtlety of strategy was not in demand. We can say that the main theme of the festival was the diversity of the world and the complexity of the coexistence of alien models. This is what most of the paintings presented were dedicated to. For example, the film “Bridge over the Wadi”, shot by the Barak brothers from Israel (it deservedly won the international feature-length film competition), which tells the story of a school where Jewish and Arab children study together, and teachers do their best to avoid unification, preserving national identity, and accustom young representatives of warring peoples to the idea of the need to recognize the presence of the other and respect his otherness. The phrase that the winner dictates the rules, but he should not forget that his position causes suffering to the vanquished, said by a Jewish teacher, struck me with the level of trust in students who are really learning to exist in a heterogeneous world.
The film “My Father is Turkish”, directed by German director Markus Fetter, tells about the same thing, but on a different level, about himself and his father living in Turkey, whom his adult son finally decided to meet in order to understand both the story of his mother and himself. himself, and those who are alien to him by culture and related by blood, who speak a different language and live in a different world.
The film “Family in Exile,” directed by Iranian Arash Riari, who grew up in Austria, is about the same thing. This is a story about how members of one traditional Iranian family, living in America and Europe, one day get together in Saudi Arabia to finally see their parents and sisters who remained in Iran. Europeans and Americans, cousins, are trying to accept or reject the laws of the Muslim world and test the strength of blood ties with the difference of their new cultures. One of the heroes of this film, the director's father, a former teacher of Persian culture at an Iranian university, who fled with his children and wife to Austria, came to the festival to talk about his experiences. And it was quite instructive to listen to a man who passionately loves his homeland and culture, but is forced not only to live his whole life among strangers, but to watch how his children turn out to be strangers where he belongs.
A Norwegian film was also made about overcoming otherness and respect for others, which became the main prize of the festival - “Patience in Hearts”, which tells about the complex relationship with the world of a person with Down syndrome.
Most of the films at the festival were about our own and others, but they all had one flaw - they were not made about those who today trample the green lawns of the Mariinsky Park and the cobblestones of Khreshchatyk, those who learn one language and forget another.
But Jerzy Hoffman spoke about them at a press conference, who came to Contact to present new episodes of his large project “Ukraine: The Formation of a Nation”: “If we consider everything “other” to be hostile or dangerous, a drama of great xenophobia begins. accustomed to the fact that Ukraine is nothing more than a small part of Russia, Little Russia, this is unacceptable. But the period of military conflicts in Europe, I hope, has passed irrevocably and taught us something that Russia can be a great country because of its wealth, industry, oil. , as well as culture and science, but must get used to the fact that Ukraine is independent...” The Polish director also said that the impetus for his work was the appearance of Leonid Kuchma’s book, or rather, its title “Ukraine is not Russia.” In his film, the director would like to address the West with the question: “What do you know about Ukraine?”, to Russia - “What do you think about Ukraine?”, to Ukraine itself - “Who are you, who do you feel like?” what is interesting is that in his rather subjective, but still educational and rather cursory film essay, Pan Hoffman dwells on the close, but still history of the country. The Polish classic believes that the Ukrainians themselves should tell about its present day - they will probably be filming material for the fifth and final series. Who Ukraine feels like is still not clear, and above all, in my opinion, to Ukraine itself...
Under the blue sky
Russian cinema at Kontakt was, frankly speaking, not presented in the best way. There were no full-length films from Russia at all, and the three short films were clearly neither the most characteristic nor the most striking ones created in recent years. “Hunger in Lies” by Pavel Ponomarev-Mendel, a television film chosen by the organizers, apparently because of the theme of the Holodomor, tells the story of an American journalist who worked in the Soviet Union, but kept silent about mass deaths from starvation and even issued a refutation of the leaked Western press information about this. “Four Wives of the Petrel of the Revolution” is a professionally and well-made montage film by Alexander Stolyarov on a completely hackneyed topic about the suspicious circumstances of the death of Maxim Gorky, in which the text, as in any television narrative, is more important than the image. The most original of the selected films is “Hello, Fellini!”, shot by the young director Arman Yeritsyan, whose previous work, the poignant documentary melodrama “Under the Open Air” about homeless people in Yerevan, attracted everyone’s attention to him. In my opinion, the new film, whose heroine, a street singer, belongs to the tribe of eccentrics and city crazy people beloved by documentarians, is much weaker. In it, the author places too much trust in the “self-playfulness” of the material, which cannot withstand such trust. However, for the festival's young viewers this film seemed the most interesting - perhaps due to the modernity of the language and form, already well known in Russia, but not yet mastered in Ukraine. Nevertheless, it is a pity that there was no demand for new documentary films in Russia. Although in the program for the public, out of competition, Alexander Rastorguev’s film “Wild, Wild Beach” was shown, innovative and tough, which caused real controversy and even sharp rejection from some Kyiv filmmakers. However, this film did not become the object of close attention of local youth or intellectuals - in general, the attendance of city cinemas, where some films of the festival were shown this year, was not very good, and the director of “Contact” Andrei Khalpakhchi recalled Amsterdam with sadness and envy , where tickets for documentaries are sold out long before the festival starts and the halls are packed to capacity. The Kyiv public still needs to be accustomed to such feats.
Submarine from the Ukrainian steppes
The first “Contact” opened solemnly and emotionally. Then the very fresh President Yushchenko came to the ceremony, who cried after watching the documentary “Roses for Signora Raisa.” This time, neither Yushchenko nor other important political figures were at the opening, but it would be useful for them to see the picture presented to the public that evening. The film “Pan Pilipenko and His Submarine” was shot by German filmmakers Jan Henrik Drews and Rene Harder. Strictly speaking, this is not quite a documentary film, the film exists in the fashionable space today between fiction and documentary films, although all its heroes are real people, and everything that happens is only directed by the skillful hand of its directors in the right direction, but it actually exists. Pan Pilipenko is a pensioner, lives in the village of Evgenievka in the Ukrainian outback, speaks Surzhik, does not know the Ukrainian literary language and does not understand it well. He has a dream - he is building a submarine. Thirty years, collecting parts from junk, according to drawings from old Soviet magazines, taking time away from the main activity - raising fish in cages, geese and piglets. The wife is unhappy, there is little money, the children need help, and the husband is spending his pension on batteries. But now, not without instigation from German filmmakers, Pan Pilipenko is going to test his submarine in the Black Sea. He hires a truck, places his blue-green unit on it and moves with it to the Crimea, towards deep-sea fish and herbs. The film is silent about how the amateur submariners managed to persuade the vigilant border guards, but the heroes who came to the premiere said that they had to involve military attaches, the German embassy and even the father of the Klitschko brothers, but in the end the dive took place. At the end of the film, the hero of the film was shown to the guests in all his almost folklore typicality - a man of big and meaningless dreams, cheerful and unsinkable, like his submarine.
An artistic image is the only thing that remains in the mind from a series of events and many of their interpretations, the only thing that people truly remember, that determines their attitude towards the past and present. Until reality is reflected in art, its essence is unknown to anyone, no matter what politicians say, and only art gives reality form and definition. By the way, we talked about this with one of the members of the international jury of “Contact”, a Russian director with a Ukrainian passport, now living in Germany, Sergei Loznitsa. A detailed interview with him about the essence of the art of documentary filmmaking, its boundaries and tasks will be published in future issues of Vremya Novostei.