Ruslan Fedotov
A heartbreaking portrait of 16-year-old Ukrainian refugees Andrey and Alisa, who help out at a school for refugee children in Budapest. Andrey asks the children to draw pictures of something from back home in Ukraine. What beautiful things can they recall? He offers the example of his own grandfather’s cherry orchard. The children use confrontational, adult vocabulary to describe their experiences of war. A young boy earnestly goes through a number of battle strategies, and a girl provides a vivid account of a rocket attack.
This is ‘a road movie’ encapsulated in the Moscow metro system and filmed over the course of one year: a documentary film that observes cultural and social issues in modern Russia.
The story of everyday survival of traditional Arctic sea hunters of the Bering Strait in the Far East of Russia is enriched with incredible and heartwarming animated Inuit myths, that, at times, prevail reality. "The Book of the Sea" is a dramatic parable about the vitality of the ancient Arctic culture.
The story of the shy and quiet orphan, 16-year-old Red from Vladivostok.
A girl — or a woman — in a bright red scarf, with a soft toy mouse in her arms. To look at her, you wouldn’t guess that she’s 50 and has been homeless for three years. Her incredible passion to live prevents her from freezing on the cold streets of Moscow.
The story of a Moscow based electronic musician Moa Pillar traveling to Nalchik, a small town located at Caucasus in the South of Russia, in order to meet Bulat Khalilov, a local music enthusiast who has started a field recording label that documents traditional Circassian music. Bulat connects Moa Pillar to the local music community, so that Moa can collaborate with folk musicians who represent the tradition deeply rooted in the history of the country and its inner struggles. The collaboration experiment reveals a clash between century-old traditions and modern culture of millennials and makes both heroes doubt the possibility of a dialogue between two worlds they represent.
For generations, the Salamanca community of Mennonites has been living in the same modest and rigidly organized way. Modern-day scenes are accompanied by a voice-over narrating a man’s recollections of his youth. “As soon as I close my eyes,” he explains, “I go back to the past, to the moment when I made the choice that shaped my entire life.” Speaking in the Plautdietsch language, he talks calmly of the strong curiosity he felt as a young boy about the world beyond Salamanca and the Mennonite faith – a curiosity for which he paid dearly.
Sigur Rós have given a dozen film makers the same modest budget and asked them to create whatever comes into their head when they listen to songs from the band's album Valtari. The idea is to bypass the usual artistic approval process and allow people utmost creative freedom. These 16 films are the result. Sad, funny, beautiful and, occasionally, plain bewildering, they represent just some of the available emotional responses to this most contemplative album.
