Garage Screen summer cinema at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art will host an echo of the first New Holland Island International Debut Film Festival. The program includes premieres of competition and out of competition films, screenings of the winners, and a special program Inventing the Future. Some screenings will be followed by Q&As with filmmakers and discussions with various researchers.
New Holland Island International Debut Film Festival is a platform for new and daring cinema whose mission is to support original creative expression and to amplify new voices internationally.
The festival was established in 2019 in St. Petersburg. It was marked by a large-scale three-day preview, during which over 50,000 people visited New Holland Island. The president of the festival is Alexander Rodnyansky, the program director is Alexey Artamonov, and Andrey Kartashov is the curator of the short competition. The festival is organized by the team of the New Holland: Cultural Urbanization project.
The first festival included an international competition and was planned as the key event of the New Holland Island 2020 program, but cinema and reality have suddenly swapped places, and the world pandemic made adjustments to the original script. Despite that, the festival took place, keeping the competition program in its entirety, showing some of the films online on the Nonfiction.film platform and some offline in St. Petersburg.
In Moscow, the audience will be able to see the winning films from the festival— Xinyuan Zheng Lu’s The Cloud in Her Room (main competition Grand Prix) and Théo Court’s Blanco en blanco (main competition Jury Prize), as well as pictures by the laureates of the short film competition, including Julietta Korbel’s Still Working, Vytautas Katkus’s Community Gardens, How to Disappear by Total Refusal, and Catriona Gallagher’s Perdikaki (special mention).Visitors will also be able to attend the world premieres of the debut films Mom, I befriended ghosts by Sasha Voronov (main competition) and Danton’s Death by Andrey Stadnikov (Made in Russia program), see the only Russian participant of the Rotterdam Film Festival competition, Babai by Artem Aisagaliev (Made in Russia program) along with the long-awaited Russian premiere of The Image Book, the latest film by the legendary Jean-Luc Godard and a new short film dedicated to him, France Against the Robots by another classic of political cinema Jean-Marie Straub.
Garage also presents Inventing the Future—a special program dedicated to different concepts of the future and the connection of cinema with modern philosophy. It was named after the work of Isiah Medina, a young experimental director from Canada and based on the book of the same name by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Medina’s film of the same name will be screened in full. Other participants include a film featuring a conversation with the founder of cyberfeminism Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival and a dedicated to Eurasianism poetic video essay by Metahaven, a Dutch collective of artists and designers, Eurasia (Questions on Happiness). A discussion with researchers from Russia will follow the screenings of these three films.
An important part of the program will be the Russian premiere of IWOW: I Walk On Water, shot by the African-American director and photographer Khalik Allah. This three-hour cinematic trip through the streets of Harlem in search of enlightenment is one of the brightest and most unconventional documentaries of the year, as well as a key event of the festival’s echo at Garage Screen.
