Deadly number in the city N

The “Images of Reality” festival takes on a new path

The town of Nyon, located on the shores of Lake Geneva, has made “names” for many documentarians. For example, our Victor Kosakovsky received as many as five prizes here in 1993 for “The Belovs” - a set that immediately brought him into the forefront of world documentary filmmaking.

We all gain experience, if not wisdom, with age. The experience of the festival “Images of Reality” is courage. Held for the thirteenth time, the forum has abandoned the priority of documentary films: the program includes many staged, openly fictional and desperately provocative films. “Our festival is not called a documentary film festival, it is called “Images of Reality,” says artistic director Jean Perret, one of the leading theorists of non-fiction cinema.

I sympathize with him. There are more and more film festivals. (The same Kosakovsky said that his film “Hush!” in 2005 was shown - at some show - every day.) The reason for this is the fragmentation of culture. A variety of sociocultural groups have their own needs. Increasingly, festivals serve the financial and reputational interests of their own organizers and the cities where they are held. Even those film screenings that were once truly major cultural phenomena and determined the place of a particular film in the value system can be accused of some selfishness. Now Cannes has become a closed club with strict face control (three dozen directors' names move from the list of competitors to the list of jury members and back), Venice indulges the ambitions of outsiders of the world box office, Berlin strives to point out the painful points of the body of modernity...

There is no time to build a hierarchy, there is no time to determine the value of a particular painting... And small festivals that have acquired status become pavilions where they demonstrate the latest examples of artistic thought. Nyon took exactly this position: the competition is nothing, the cultural movement is everything.

Of course, the films that are usually shown at documentary screenings are also shown here. The loudly political "Strawberry Fields" by Israeli Ayelet Heller is about Palestinians growing their only export product - strawberries - under constant shelling. Canadians Debbie Melnick and Rick Kane's justifiably incensed "The Making of a Dissident: The Exposé of Michael Moore" is about a celebrated filmmaker who made a name for himself through deft manipulation. Mika Kaurismäki's catchy "Solar Mirror" is about the mysterious paths of Brazilian music. The orthodox documentary “Sons” of the German Volker Koepp, one of the last die-hard realists among non-gamers. Koepp is not shy about his East German heritage. He films about East Germany or about our Kaliningrad region, or about Ukrainian Galicia, or about the territories of Poland that were once German. His films rarely last less than two hours, because the political correctness of Eurodocumentary is subject to the principle “detail is a guarantee of authenticity.” It turns out well, thoroughly, sometimes touchingly - Koepp's heroes, as a rule, are good, poor people who have fallen under the wheels of history. And it’s boring... So it is in “Sons,” where we are talking about a family of Baltic Germans, divided by the war and reunited only in the 70s. “Sons” received the main prize. It looked like a farewell to the departing - worthy - documentaries. The key (albeit unnamed) theme of the festival was... the power of the moment.

It is important for the advanced director Perret to find in documentary something that indicates its unique property - to transform the current moment into an artistic image, to switch the register from relevance to eternity. And he finds: this is the ability to capture the decisive moment, the turning point of existence. Two such points are obvious - birth and death.

That’s why the Nyon program included many films about death. About preparation for it in the bright film “Because I Dream” by Canadian Serge Jaeger about five old men. About the injustice of dying in “The Big Sale,” where a 19-year-old Filipino died because his mother did not have money for dialysis, and medicine in his country was completely privatized (the film, you see, is relevant for us too). About what remains and whether it remains from a deceased person, in “No More” by the German woman Karin Jursik. About retribution with death for the struggle in “In Memory of Alexander Litvinenko” by the Dutchmen Joos De Putter and Masha Novikova.

Contrasting with the “cinema death” was a “photo birth”: an exhibition of photographs by the Japanese Shunji Dodo, held as part of the festival, which was a rather brutal report about the birth experienced by Naomi Kawase, a famous Japanese director; In her films, she tirelessly tests the strength of the boundary between fiction and non-fiction cinema, experimentation and traditional storytelling. Her new film is in competition at the upcoming Cannes. In Nyon, which opened Kawase to the Western world in 1996, it is unrivaled: childbirth in black and white photographs is captured in all its physiology, but also in all its existential significance. A new personality enters a very old world - according to Japanese tradition, on a mat. But the provocateur transforms the physical torment into the torment of creativity: a truly unforgettable photo where the obstetrician removes the placenta from her, and she bends over and films this process on a video camera. There are still moments when “images of reality” are born from reality itself.

Victoria BELOPOLSKAYA, Nyon-Moscow