"Woodstock: Three Days That Changed a Generation" is not a film about music, but about what surrounded it / Beat Festival

Every year, Beatfest grows, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to choose films to watch, because you want everything. Films about David Bowie, Woodstock, Muhammad Ali, and a madman who climbs a cliff without safety equipment, and the film crew doesn’t know how the film will end. Four dozen films are sorted into several sections for easy navigation: there’s Music, Coming of Age (films about young people), Master Plan (about cities), Beyond the Holiday (about the world of fashion), Freedom of Movement (about club subculture), New People (about those who want to change the world), Gala Premieres (Oscar winners and other documentary hits of recent years). There are classic documentaries and a trendy VR section (and it includes works by such contemporary art stars as Marina Abramovic and Anish Kapoor). There is, finally, a national competition, in which any surprises are possible, and the award gives the winner a ticket to the big festival life, because "Bitfest" is already a noticeable point on the map of world documentary cinema. In some cases, the audience's choice is simple ("Oscar" - must take!), in others it is less obvious - and the following list of Vedomosti is mostly about them.

"Zona" (Clayton Vomero, USA, 2018, Coming of Age)

One of the most unexpected films made by foreigners about the post-Soviet space. There are two parts to "The Zone". The first is historical: a chronicle of the early 1990s, interviews with participants and observers of the events of that time in politics and youth culture (music critic Artemy Troitsky, editor of "Ptyuch" Igor Shulinsky, etc.). The second is watercolor sketches from the lives of today's 20-year-olds in Russia and Ukraine. They buy fake sneakers of expensive brands, dream of going somewhere, just lie in the grass. Nothing really happens, but gradually the two pictures come together into one, and you are stunned by the sudden understanding that these guys live exactly the same way their parents did, and the freedom of that time has not gone anywhere, as if it was passed down by inheritance.

"Moscow is like a dream" (Margarita Zakharova, Russia, 2019, national competition)

Three years ago, Margarita Zakharova's film "Inner rap" won the Smena program of the Beat Film Festival. "Moscow" is her first full-length experience; initially, she was going to make a feature film, and this is felt in the construction of "Moscow". This is a witty and tough story of a relationship crisis between two young people against the backdrop of a wild, drunken, talkative city, its performances, exhibitions and plastic cups of wine. Tired blonde Nastya, the daughter of an art gallery owner, eats all the time, and her lover, Montenegrin Kabir with an irresistible Hollywood smile, drinks and has fun all the time. They lived together in Moscow for five years, Kabir goes back to Montenegro to help his family build a house, and Nastya stays behind to work and grow old. The film is shot with such desperate ease that all the madmen, freeloaders and party-goers of Moscow - as well as all the Montenegrin handsome men - really seem like a dream.

The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley (Alex Gibney, USA, 2019, New People)

A documentary and very bloody thriller based on the story of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos. She dreamed of changing the world and was sure that she could predict the onset of diseases at early stages. On her side was the latest blood analysis technology she had invented, billions of dollars given to her by investors, wild popularity and support of senators, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch and the entire American people. There was only one thing against her: her technology did not work. Oscar-winner Alex Gibney, the author of Taxi to the Dark Side, We Steal Secrets: The History of Wikileaks, Steve Jobs, believes that documentaries, like journalism in general, are never objective. But there is little subjectivity in the film either: the heroine, a snowy, unblinking fake queen who went from glory to complete collapse, remains a mystery.

"War of Art" (Tommy Gulliksen, Morten Traavik, Norway, Germany, 2019, "New People")

Morten Traavik's previous film, Independence Day, told the story of the adventures of the band Laibach in North Korea and seemed like pure trolling, an attempt to blow up totalitarianism with rock music. Now Traavik has taken a group of contemporary European artists to Pyongyang. As funny as the previous film was, this one is frightening: polite North Koreans do not recognize almost any contemporary art as art, and by the middle of the film it begins to seem that art does not push boundaries, but creates new ones. And when North Korea successfully tests a hydrogen bomb, the scarlet TV screen in the hotel seems like a much stronger artistic statement than all the artists' attempts to introduce Koreans to contemporary art. A powerful film about whether it is possible to find a common language with totalitarianism.

"Minding the Gap" (Bing Liu, USA, 2018, Coming of Age)

A skateboarding video turned into a coming-of-age story, a film that won a special jury prize at Sundance and was nominated for an Oscar. Three friends – one of whom is filming this movie – skateboard, climb onto roofs, do a million stupid things, but most importantly, they talk about their relationships with this harsh world, with their family, with themselves. Racism, abuse, maternal hopes, a dead city, a sick adult life that you want to escape from, and the only thing that gives you freedom is skating. “When you’re still a kid,” says one of the characters, “you don’t think, you just act. As you grow up, you lose that skill.” The film is a portrait of people growing up who have not yet forgotten how to “just act.”

Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation (Barak Goodman, USA, 2019, Music)

A full immersion into the legendary festival of August 1969 – not the music, as in Michael Wadley’s classic film Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music (1970), but the surroundings. Barak Goodman tells the story of the people and the times – the organizers of Woodstock, the audience, those who handed out food during the festival, those who rescued the stoned. The festival was an organizational nightmare; everything that could go wrong, did. There was no time to build a fence around the field, so Woodstock had to be free. The musicians had to make up songs on stage. There were 176 cases of asthma, 2 cases of appendicitis, 6 cases of psychosis, 11 rat bites. And yet the director edits the rarest archival footage as an endless kaleidoscope of happiness, and all his characters are just voiceovers against the backdrop of these shots, just memories of paradise, of three days when time first stopped and then went at a different speed. A film that allows you to feel the history and understand why and how Woodstock changed a generation.

May 30 – June 9

What to watch at the 10th Beatfest