I found this documentary hard going. If I’d seen it at the start of the festival and less tired, I might have been awed by the technique of overlapping footage with disconnected but meaningful audio.
Continue readingIntercepted (2024)
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Paradise (Paradis) (2023)
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A couple of cinematic hours in a remote, Siberian village is never a bad thing. I still remember the exquisite Ága (2018), an intensely beautiful exploration of silence and subsistence that immersed you in a life that seems far removed from what we think of as Russian culture.
Continue readingNavalny (2022)
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This is just the kind of documentary you want to watch. It’s got intrigue, a charismatic protagonist and it captures real-life drama unfolding on camera.
Continue readingUnclenching the Fists (Разжимая кулаки) (2021)
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This is a quintessential film festival film. It immerses you into a little known culture (North Ossetia), claustrophobically shows you the grim reality of an abused person (Ada), weaves a metaphor throughout (those clenched fists), and gives you a final act that will leave you confounded, exhilarated and thinking about it long afterwards.
Continue readingDear Comrades! (Dorogie tovarishchi) (2020)
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In carefully composed black and white imagery, we watch the Soviet propaganda machine go into overdrive to cover up 1960s labour strikes and a subsequent, ill-advised massacre.
Continue readingWelcome to Chechnya (2020)
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I couldn’t look away from this gripping documentary about the awful abuse and murder of LGBT+ people in Chechnya. What at first seems a story about gay people, becomes something much more universal where we can see the awful ripple effects of persecution, the terrible cost and how easy it is to become a refugee.
Continue readingDAU. Natasha (2020)
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On the surface, this may seem like a standard arthouse movie about 1950s Soviet life. As it is, this small but intense story of two canteen workers in a secret Soviet research institute is hard to look away from but, when you learn more about the DAU project, it becomes remarkable.
Continue readingLoveless (Nelyubov) (2017)
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Image via miff.com.au
This slow and bleakly beautiful meditation on the decay and desolation of modern day Russia is framed around the story of one broken family. Continue reading
Act and Punishment (2015)
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Image via http://www.huffingtonpost.com
“I got hurt feelings, I got hurt feelings,” so sing Jermaine and Brett, of Flight of the Conchords, and, in the case of Russian punk activists, Pussy Riot, so did the Russian Orthodox Church. Continue reading
Don Juan (2015)
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What a powerful documentary about our ability to be destructive to those we love. Oleg is a young Russian man with autism. He lives with his mother who wants him to be normal, sending him to multiple therapies, berating him for not being a ‘real man’ who can support and protect her. We can see she carries a bitter well of resentment and her only focus is Oleg. Continue reading
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