According to tradition, the opening ceremony of the 36th International Film Festival Molodist was pompous, with all the ceremonious components observed: Ukraine Palace, President Yushchenko’s somewhat monotonous speech, and the presentation of the Golden Deer for meritorious contribution to the art of filmmaking. This year’s winner is Irina Skobtseva, the widow of the film director and actor Serhii Bondarchuk, and their son Fedor Bondarchuk, also a film director and actor.
The first film shown during the festival was Paris, My Love, a collection of eighteen 15-minute short films made in various districts of the French capital by different directors, including Gus Van Sant, Alfonso Cuaron, Wes Craven, and Joel and Ethan Coen.
The first round of student films was also held. Most of the productions turned out to be amazingly mature. Peter Templeman’s Rescuer (Australia), Umesh Vinayak Kulkarni’s Little Mill (India), Maria Francesca Costabile’s In the Heart of Rome (Italy), Talia Lavi’s Replacement (Italy) Magdalena Pieta’s Everything Will Be (Poland), and Kim Hio-Jeong’s Rabbits and Bears (Korea) are thoroughly “adult” short stories on screen, well made, with good scripts, and talented actors. Unfortunately, the Ukrainian productions (Bohdana Smyrnova’s Haircut and Oleksandr Usik’s The Devil’s Theorem) paled against this background, to put it mildly.
As usual, both the audience and the press will pay special attention to the hors concours works. The festival will close with The Faun’s Labyrinth by the talented Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. Among other noted figures in this category are Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki and his Lights in the Dusk, Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep, Otar Ioseliani’s Gardens in Autumn, Claire Denis’s Trouble Everyday, Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Exterminating Angels, and the noted French actor-turned director Albert Dupontel’s Bernie. A meeting with Kira Muratova and the screening of her new short film The Doll will be the most important hors concours event.
Large audiences are expected at the retrospective screening of Luchino Visconti’s films, Konrad Wolf of the Potsdam filmmaking school and Cine Fantom Presents... (Russian cine-underground), British silent films of the late 19th century (Brighton School), the commemoration of the 80 th anniversary of Louis Lumiere’s school of filmmaking, the modern German, French, and Russian cinema (the latter’s newest productions), collections of British, German, French, and prize-winning shorts from the Cannes Festival’s International Critics’ Week.
The competition is divided into three nominations: feature-length films (13, including Alan Badoiev’s Orange Love, the first Ukrainian production in recent years), shorts (25), and student films (also shorts, 26 in all). The Ukrainian filmmaking heritage of the past two years will be screened under the title “Ukrainian Panorama” at the most democratic movie theater Zhovten, not far from Kontraktova Ploshcha. This program, previously also hors concours, now has its own prize.
Among the feature-length films are productions that were acknowledged at prestigious international forums, like Alicia Scherson’s Play (Chili/France), recognized as the best Latin American debut at the Havana Film Festival, Corneliu Porumboiu’s 12:08 East of Bucharest (Camera d’Or, Cannes 2006), Milena Andonova’s A Monkey in Winter (Bulgaria; recognized as the best Eastern European debut in Karlovy Vary). So it seems as though the organizers have succeeded in ensuring that the competition, at least in the feature film category, is as interesting as the hors concours premieres.
The festival favorite will become clear by the end of the week.
