"Window to Europe"

The Window to Europe Film Festival has handed out prizes. Vedomosti has compiled its own list of nominations and awards, which partly coincides with the official one.

Face of the festival: Rolan Bykov

"Window to Europe - 2019" made its face Rolan Bykov, who would have turned 90 this year. In the festival video, Bykov, with a sad-cheerful (exactly half and half) clown face of the author from the prologue to the film "Aibolit-66", daily reminded the festival audience that the author's face should be visible at once, and addressed them with the following words: "When you know how things really are, then you can make up a fairy tale." Bykov and his co-author Vadim Korostylev laughed in their brilliant, timeless "Aibolit" on various occasions, including political ones ("we caught up with the doctor and overtook him"). The seemingly innocent wisdom from the prologue also aimed at the powerful "storytellers" who know perfectly well how things really are, but lie shamelessly. Today, when it’s time to film “Aibolit-666”, this conflict is more relevant than ever, and it’s great that the face of “Window” is a genius and a truly free person.

Window to Europe Film Festival: Our Aki Kaurismäki

Lifestyle / Culture

The most life-affirming film: "Death Becomes Us"

Serious festivals like to create their own heroes and then follow their path in art with interest. Okno v Evropu is not far behind in this regard. Having discovered director Boris Guts last summer with his film Fagot, shot on a mobile phone, Okno this year took his comedy melodrama Death Becomes Us, produced in the same low-budget way, into the game competition. As a result, the jury, headed by playwright Alexander Borodyansky, unanimously awarded Guts's film the main prize. Despite the word "death" in the title and the extremely sad plot (a girl is diagnosed with cancer, her boyfriend must urgently find money for treatment), this film is born of a joyful sense of life and so successfully fights despondency and hypocrisy that it is difficult to hold back from laughing (for example, when the hero goes to extremes, trying to earn money by participating in the porno School Years Are Wonderful). From a formal point of view, the film is not perfect: the open reception with mobile phone filming sometimes contradicts the plot logic. But these flaws are easy to forgive. Guts's festival victory indicates a possible production path for authors cut off from state money (accepting a modest, in the opinion of the guild representative himself, award of 200,000 rubles from the Producers Guild, the director did not hide the fact that this was a considerable part of his film's budget).

Darkest Film: "As We Will"

This example of independent art-house cinema (scriptwriter, director, producer – Vladimir Kozlov) remained without awards. From a professional point of view, the film is really weak, it is not friendly with life authenticity (and this is still a social drama). However, castigating social vices, it resorts to such strong means that it inevitably attracts attention. The main object of the author's hatred is the police, represented by two thugs, embodying the lawlessness of power. They show up at a nightclub to shake money out of its owner, and there they come across a young couple in the heat of the moment. Apparently, the girl sees cops for the first time in her life, so for some reason she gets into trouble. A fight breaks out almost out of nowhere, and the guy, saving his girlfriend, hits a cop on the head with a skateboard at the door of the club, under the cameras. Along the way, not forgetting to drop a passport at the crime scene and thereby helping the werewolves in uniform to declare a hunt for the couple with extortion of money and a deadly ending.

Festival story: mother and son

Two award-winning films focused on the dramatic relationship between mother and son. In Konstantin Bronzit's (He Can't Live Without Space, Special Jury Prize), a woman gives birth to a boy who is destined to follow in the footsteps of his deceased father along the dusty paths of distant planets. She understands and accepts this, but is unable to survive their inevitable separation. Bronzit's metaphor is simple: for a loving mother, the departure of her grown-up son from his home is tantamount to his going into outer space. When the son returns to earthly affairs, it will be too late to change anything. But it is not too late to at least realize it.

What was shown at the 27th Window to Europe Film Festival

Lifestyle / Culture

In Dmitry Davydov's film "There is no god but me", the main character (Pyotr Sadovnikov won the prize for the best male role) completely dissolves in filial feelings for his seriously ill mother. He leaves his wife, who did not want to endure the inconvenience of an inadequate mother-in-law, leaves the children - stays with his mother. However, her illness progresses, and now fellow villagers, protecting their own peace, ask to take the old woman away from sight. And that means leaving home, losing his job. The son goes for all this. For him, there is no choice - only his mother, her misfortune and her need for him, even if she herself no longer understands this. The author tells the story of self-sacrifice in a laconic language, he is strict and restrained, does not fall into either tearful sentimentality or clinical naturalism and in the finale rises to tragic heights. But if the path to such a finale did not take almost two hours, which is not entirely justified, it would have benefited the film.

Festival Hero: The Lonely Artist

In my previous review I already mentioned Vitaly Suslin's "The Seventh Run Along the Contour of the Globe" (special jury prize), which tells the story of an elderly warehouse security guard to whom life is not at all kind, but the poor landscapes he paints are sunny and joyful in spite of everything. Natalya Nazarova in "A Simple Pencil" (special jury prize) also develops the plot of "a person against difficult circumstances" with the involvement of "artistic" material. A woman from St. Petersburg gets a job as an art teacher in a provincial school to be closer to the colony where her husband is serving time, and not only believes that exposure to beauty can change the world around her for the better, but also begins to take active steps in this direction. In both cases, we are not talking about the main character's great artistic talent, if we understand this as the practical ability to produce original painting, graphics, etc. (the guard and teacher were demonstratively denied such talent), but about the fact that art can save and rescue.

Vyborg

What was memorable about “Window to Europe – 2019”