Do we have tomorrow?

Open letters recently have become the norm. When SOS signals are heard from everywhere, it is not clear who to throw a life buoy into the water. The sea storms for a long time and for many.

For seven years, we have made the International Festival of Independent Cinema “ 2 Morrow /Tomorrow” and sincerely believed that we were contributing to the development of our culture. During this short period, the festival has experienced a number of changes. Sometimes forced, sometimes voluntary. We changed software directors, sites, concepts. We were in a tireless search and corresponded to a rapidly changing time. The festival not only demonstrated the novelties of the author’s cinema from all over the world, but created a movie dialogue with the viewer, talking on an equal footing. It was important for us to maintain the ideological basis of equal rights, delivered from obsessive mentor tone, pathos paths, unjustified pricing policy. In the last year, we refused a single curator to finally decentralize the festival. Each program gained independence. Each voice was valuable. We like a world in which they do not draw distinctions by any signs: national, social, sexual. It was important for us that 2 Morrow would not just be a platform with a selection of individual film screenings, but become a single festival organism, which has lived a full -fledged life and rallied devoted friends and fans of cinema around itself.

But here is the paradox: the more thanks and positive reviews we heard in our address, the harder there was funding, as if we became inconvenient for someone, crossed the road in the wrong place, violating someone's rules. At some point, the preparation of the festival turned into the upholstery of the thresholds, begging the money and the need to prove its need over again. Nevertheless, we managed to make the festival contrary to the minimum team, for minimal means and terms, while maintaining the maximum quality of programs ... And here we are again at the zero mark.

To date, neither the Ministry of Culture nor the Department of Culture of Moscow has confirmed their willingness to support the festival. We are forced to regard such silence with great regret as an unanimous refusal, which automatically leads to the liquidation of 2 Morrow /Tomorrow. Therefore, our last hope is to seek help from our friends and colleagues, who believes that the International Festival of Independent Cinema “ 2 Morrow /Tomorrow” is necessary in Moscow. It is no secret that a number of cultural events were now threatened by the breakdown. When there is a war into which we are all already drawn in one way or another-who is emotionally, who somehow otherwise, the cessation of the work of film festivals may seem like a trifle. But the muse should not be silent when they say guns. And in order not to be bogged down in hatred of each other, not to get confused in the warped concepts, not to be in isolation from the world cultural life that is happening behind the symbolic curtain, not having the opportunity to even be exhausted as it should be, we need to protect the territory at which the meetings of cultures, meetings of people, and meetings of films can take place.

If you think that “2 Morrow” should continue their activities and a cultural mission, leave an open comment on the Facebook Festival page .

We are ready to make a march again once again and organize a full-fledged festival with an interesting program in two months, if they give us such an opportunity.

If our voices are not heard by officials, then maybe the voices of our viewers will be louder and more convincing. Because the festival exists while the viewer needs.

Olga Dykhovichny and the team of the International Festival of Independent Cinema "2 Morrow /Tomorrow"