The opening and closing ceremonies will take place at the Franko National Academic Drama Theater.
This year’s Molodist will open with the film A Women’s Life of the Venice Film Festival fame. Filmed by French director Stephane Brize, it is based on the novel by Guy de Maupassant. Accordingly, the closing film will be Afterimage, Andrzej Wajda’s last work which is telling the story of the avant-garde artist Wladyslaw Strzeminski (1893-1952) who suffered persecution in Poland as an opponent of socialist realism.
The 46th Molodist Festival’s organizers received more than 2,000 applications and selected 250 films from 60 countries out of them. Unfortunately, no Ukrainian filmmaker has produced a convincing feature-length debut this year. The only Ukrainian contribution is Roman Volosevych’s Velial which will compete for a prize in the competition of student short films. However, the national competition, where the debut status is no prerequisite for participation, includes 22 works, not to mention the non-competitive Ukrainian Premieres program, where five feature-length films will be screened.
The Sunny Bunny competition for LGBT-themed films will include an archival sensation: the premiere of Will You Dance With Me? a previously unknown film by the legendary British director Derek Jarman (1942-94).
Of course, tickets to the Festival of Festivals program’s screenings will be in greatest demand, because it will show films that have won prizes in most prestigious global competitions or became successes internationally: The Birth of a Nation (Nate Parker, US), Personal Shopper (Olivier Assayas, France), Graduation (Cristian Mungiu, Romania-France-Belgium), and The Woman Who Left (Lav Diaz, the Philippines).
As for the rest of the non-competitive programs, in addition to the already traditional French Connection, German Wave, Scandinavian Panorama, and the Long Nights of Short Films, these will include the Hungarian Rhapsody (devoted to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956), the Lithuanian Focus, retrospectives Illienko’80, Shakespeare in Cinema, and the classic Century, as well as a selection of new horror films called the Horrors of Molodist.
The international jury’s president is Denis Cote, one of the most famous Canadian directors. Prizes will be awarded in the competitions of short and feature-length debuts as well as that of student works.
The festival will take place in the cinemas Zhovten, Kinopanorama, Cinema City, Planeta Kino, Ukraina, and Kyiv (the latter will be the primary venue) and will end on October 30.
