Country:Russia

Director:Sergei Ryabov

Program:Parallel Youth

Summary:

Here an insignificant event can become a disaster for a child but the kindness of the child’s soul is capable to work a miracle… even to animate a tiny fish.

Country:Russia

Director:Lev Kuleshov

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Incredibly, Kuleshov restricts himself to the parallel lives of individuals in a single cramped room as the montage graphically isolates each one. Set in a remote, frozen, and often claustrophobic location in the Yukon, the story focuses on a five-person team of gold prospectors in the Yukon who have just begun to enjoy great success when one of the members snaps, and suddenly kills two of the others. The two survivors, a husband and wife, subdue the killer but are then faced with an agonizing dilemma.

Country:Russia

Director:Lev Kuleshov

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Kuleshov in particular was fascinated by Western films of popular culture which he was eager to transform and energize by both embracing them wholeheartedly yet satirizing them with targeted irony. Luch Smert, as it is known in Russian, is made like an adventure serial, fast moving, funny and crammed full of amazing moments. Lann needs the ray of the title to make the revolutionary rising at the helium factory a success while an international gang of reactionaries, headed by Revo, try to get hold of the deadly contraption for themselves.

Country:Russia

Director:Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein and the School of Soviet Montage

Program:Multiplying Parallels

Summary:

Kuleshov demonstrated the necessity of considering montage as the basic tool of cinema art. In Kuleshov's view, the cinema consists of fragments and the assembly of those fragments, the assembly of elements which in reality are distinct. It is therefore not the content of the images in a film which is important, but their combination.

Country:Russia

Director:Andrei Tarkovsky

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

Andrei Tarkovsky now stands as one of the most well regarded directors in history. The Mirror has no apparent plot. Instead it rhythmically combines contemporary scenes and the reminiscences of a dying man with childhood memories during World War II, recollections of a painful divorce in the family and newsreel footage. At various points in the film poems by Tarkovsky's father, Arseny Tarkovsky, are recited. The loose flow of visually oneiric images has been compared to the stream of consciousness technique in literature.

Country:Russia

Director:Aleksander Rou

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

This film bears unavoidable similarities to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: a little girl named Olya breaks into Grandmother’s jam cabinet and accidentally drops a jar, the mirror in her house begins to talk to her and she follows her cat into the mirror where she meets her reflection Aylo. The two embark on a strange journey after witnessing a youth being sent to a Death Tower for rebelling and making straight mirrors so that people can see the truth instead of being fooled into believing the lies of the crooked mirrors(where the old look young and vice versa).

Country:France, Russia

Director:Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Alexandrov

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

This is a complete anomaly in the catalogue of Soviet master Eisenstein who was the most visible practitioner of Soviet montage techniques around the world largely due to the success of his Battleship Potemkin. This is a work which is completely Russian in character but it was shot while Eisenstein and his cinematographer Edouard Tisse were in France. A woman alone in a huge well appointed house sits at her piano and rehearses a few Russian songs which prompt a torrent of parallel imagery concentrated in nature   which is spectacular to the point of jaw dropping.

Country:Russia

Director:Lev Kuleshov

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

Lev Kuleshov was one of the most important theoreticians of the Russian school of the Avant Garde particularly with regard to montage yet each of his feature films suggest unique approaches to very disparate material. The level of irony still apparent and even more pronounced after the fall of the Soviet Union in this comic, yet decidedly propagandistic, film from the silent era provides it with a sardonic resonance. The film chronicles the adventures of an American, "Mr. West," and his faithful bodyguard and servant Jeddie, as they visit the land of the horrible, evil Bolsheviks.

Country:Russia

Director:Vsevovlod Pudovkin

Program:Parralel Pathways

Summary:

An early comic short by Russian master Pudovkin which perfectly illustrates the radical approach to editing found in the Russian avant-garde as well as the construction of a radical framework that creates an overall dynamic which relates everything to the parallel concept of the chess game. With an international chess tournament in progress, a young man becomes completely obsessed with the game. His fiancée has no interest in it, and becomes frustrated and depressed by his neglect of her, but wherever she goes she finds that she cannot escape the everpresent condition of chess.

Country:Russia

Director:Victor Kosakovsky

Program:Contemporary World Cinema

Summary:

This startling film might be the kind of visual key note speech for this year’s festival and appropriately enough there is no real speech happening. Kosakovsky went to enormous pains to capture the moment when his own young child recognizes his reflection in a mirror. He created a room with a hidden portion for several cameras which were concealed behind two way mirrors. The unknowing child moves within the space, playing, dealing with the room as it presents itself.

Link to IMDB.com