Day after tomorrow"

“Lord, how difficult life was for Einstein—there are so many idiots around,” director David Lynch literally shouted from the screen, causing a violent reaction from the crowded hall. The film “Lynch,” directed by an anonymous director who hid under the pseudonym Blackandwhite, was shown on Sunday evening, when the festival’s competition program was almost over (all that remained was for Russian contestant Natalya Mitrokhina to say the last word). So, in this rough, not always successfully edited documentary, the basic principles of modern auteur cinema were, it seems, formulated.

Lynch did not say a word about his or any other films. In an ominous voice, he read out some crazy messages to members of the online community, advertised transmeditation, suffered from depression, celebrated Bastille Day, ingratiated himself with the actors, destroyed already created scenery with an ax, then suddenly calmed down and uttered some unrelated things into the air monologues. For example, he said conspiratorially: “It used to be that an artist should suffer. Wrong postulate. The happier you are, the better you sleep and the tastier you eat, the more active your imagination works, the more images you are able to generate.”

At the time of writing this article, we do not yet know what the choice of the professional jury under the leadership of Jos Stelling will be and which picture the jury of Russian bloggers will prefer. However, this doesn’t matter. Because the main thing is already clear: in the “Tomorrow” competition there was not a single unsuccessful or simply passable film. The authors who presented their works (and most of them came to Moscow) were similar to their paintings in the same way as David Lynch was to his “Inland Empire”. The organizers of the festival managed to create an image of a certain new generation of independent directors, in whose attitude to cinema there are neither ready-made formulas nor the pathos of denying some enemy mainstream. Not one of them uttered the words “I was influenced by...” at the press conference, no one burst into an angry speech against Hollywood, and when asked the traditional question of what genre your movie belongs to, the young people shrugged their shoulders with a smile: they say , whichever you want, refer to that. Among them there was not a single “misunderstood” or “suffering” artist, and in principle they all fit Lynch’s definition - they were happy with life, well-fed, well dressed, open and friendly.

I absolutely don’t want to pit “Zavtra” against the MIFF, which journalists from most publications have already done. By and large, the viewer is not interested in what producer Renat Davletyarov and the Interfest company were doing before. Another thing is more important: “Tomorrow” became, in fact, the first (after the chamber Cinema.doc) festival with a clearly formulated concept. The people who made it clearly understood what now lies behind the terms “new wave”, “arthouse” and “auteur cinema” that have been worn out to the point of meaninglessness. Their task was to prove that, despite the fact that “there are so many idiots around,” there are Einsteins in Russia who are ready to accept such cinema. And the festival selectors had enough taste to select from the powerful stream of low-budget digital drudgery examples of truly lively and relevant cinema, open not only to experiments, but also to the audience. By the way, the latter have not yet been recruited to the large hall of the Central Distribution Center, but this fact also has its own independent reasons, which we will talk about “tomorrow”.

Natalia Babintseva