"In Norilsk, we live like in a cage"

Documentary blockbuster "On the Nickel Moon" from the Canadian director. Artdokfest

Medusa continues to talk about all films participating in the competitive program of the Artdox Film Festival (will be held in December 2017 in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg). This time, the president of the festival Vitaly Mansky represents the documentary blockbuster “On the Nickel Moon” of the Canadian Francois Jacob.

Vitaly Mansky

Director-Documentist

One of the special focuses of “Artdokfest” is that we combine films about Russia in the same program, shot by Russian authors, and paintings about the “big Russian world” - it can be Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, and any other space where they speak Russian, which are removed by the authors from around the world.

I saw many films shot by Russian documentaries in Norilsk. In 2015, we had a big web-dog about Norilsk, who made [Alexander] Rastorguev with his team-“Norilsk. From the first person. " Given that the film was financed by the Norilsk Nickel, perhaps he was deprived of some obvious brutality inherent in this city. Even in the selection of this year there were films of young authors who went to Norilsk to talk about their impressions and emotions. That is, there are many paintings.

But to be honest, the most powerful impression was made on me by a picture of Canadian documentary, because, being in Norilsk, they offered a completely new look at the usual things. In general, in the works of foreign filmmakers very often there is a new focus, a new point of view on the most wiped spaces in Russia, which are our natural habitat. Even if you look at how foreign authors shoot Moscow, you can always notice how differently that are completely understandable and insignificant from your attitude of things.

And here we see Norilsk as a kind of lunar landscape. It often happens that the paintings of foreign authors are built on stamps - but not: it is a very bright, visual and artistically justified view of the space in which life is unnatural. I perfectly understand that the country needs Nickel and that not only the country is needed, but also the owners of Norilsk Nickel, perhaps even more to them than the country. I understand that someone should go down to the mines and raise this nickel to the mountain. But in the picture “On the Nickel Moon”, the inhabitants of Norilsk suddenly turn into real astronauts, they are even visually similar to them - their clumsy gait, in costumes of three pairs of cotton pants.

This unnaturalness is manifested in everything. In the architecture of the city, in the views of people, in spaces, which are built on the basis of climatic features, but without taking into account life. I have to say that when I looked at the “nickel moon”, partly recalled his own feeling from Cuba where he shot the film. My painting “Homeland or Death” also begins with travel, and I know that the Cubans who watched the film were surprised that the street, which they know very well, looked completely different in the film. They said: "We first saw her." And we just drove along this street slowly. Not like usual, but slowly - by January morning along an almost empty street, where a dog jumped out of the car accidentally and looked at the lens with surprise. People who walk along this street daily really felt her only in the cinema.

Probably, only in the cinema we can feel Norilsk, and it doesn’t matter whether we were there or not. Norilsk is important as a certain extreme image of the Great Russian Industrial North. The picture has many large festival shows on the main venues - it is cinematographically very brightly made. “On the Nickel Moon” demonstrates to the audience what a documentary blockbuster is a blockbuster about our being.

PS About the rest of the films of the competitive program "Artdokfest - 2017" can be found here .