Translated material
Walking to Siberia
We arrived on the 5th, Sunday. If last year on the way to Kansk they showed a sky with clouds in Cameron’s 3-D , then this year the picture was completely different. You all saw this monstrous haze very well, so in the city it’s one thing to look at it, but when you drive along the highway and see that it naturally hangs in all directions, as far as you can see, over the hills, it becomes much creepier. After yesterday's rains, of course, things got better - today we can finally see the horizon, for the first time in two, three, whatever weeks.
Kansk greeted us traditionally warmly - in my hotel room there is a canvas with a naked woman, from the balcony I can see an intersection and several destroyed buildings. This year the video campus settled in the building of the Krasnoyarsk Kinograf, the former Yenisei Cinema - this, who doesn’t know, is a regional organization that distributed films around the region. In this regard, the building has a storage room with films on film - for students in the evenings, screenings are arranged in a small hall to unload. So, yesterday we watched a film of “Thirty Three” by Georgy Danelia. I watched it in deep childhood and remembered that it seemed funny, but it turned out that it was an absolutely killer and very evil social satire, partly in the spirit of the Roberto-Beninite segment from the latest Woody Allen, only more accurate, funnier and ruthless. Again, I want to immediately take half of the text into quotes. Today we'll switch registers and watch Grave of the Firefly. Digging through this film archive is a wildly fascinating experience; so, we found something called "Little Sponges". It’s a terribly intriguing name - but, of course, taking it like this and showing it to students without looking is a little scary.
In general, Kinograf is a very picturesque place; there are posters from the mid-80s, there are archives of old Soviet film magazines, from which I draw the foundations of professional wisdom (my current favorite passage from the ones I found: “Pugovkin and science fiction - a paradox? No!”), and so on. Over time, I will try to organize a (more or less) full-fledged photo session for you, but for now I will only send you a few cards that convey, so to speak, the atmosphere.
In general, this is how things are with us. To the best of my ability, I will get in touch and talk about what is happening here. The students of the Video Campus should soon begin filming - I attended the students’ defense of their short film projects a couple of times, it should be interesting; one Krasnoyarsk girl, for example, is going to make, based on an Uzbek fairy tale (the common theme here is fairy tales of the peoples of the former USSR), something like a handmade Gondry with a bias towards 60-year-old psychedelia. I would watch this, for sure.