VNUTRI Festival of Amateur Experimental Film emerged in 2022 through an informal joint effort of self-organized film clubs and horizontal cultural initiatives across Russia.
The clubs’ curators and the researchers who joined them were interested in working with films made in the regions, while the cinematic practices of radical movements such as Necrorealism and Parallel Cinema inspired them to work with films made by non-professionals. As a result, the festival team focused on the contemporary regional context and amateur cinema existing at the margins.
The festival is not tied to specific venues and has no fixed dates. Each season begins in fall and lasts until the summer of the following year. The curators deliberately avoid creating any structure within the festival, choosing to work horizontally and to resolve creative and organizational tasks collectively. Screening programs are formed from the extensive festival archive, which consists of works selected through open calls.
In the first season, the films participating in the festival were selected according to the regional principle and were grouped into compilations The Urals, Siberia, Udmurtia, The South, Privolzhye, The Far East, and Moscow/St. Petersburg. The second season included both regional programs and compilations focused on memory, the body, gluttony, critiques of capitalism, migration, psychogeography and the drift, magic, villages, mysterious incidents and fairy tale tropes, as well as special programs devoted to animation, analogue and lo-fi media, documentaries, and a program by Luch creative association of independent filmmakers.
In two years, festival screenings have taken place at over 30 venues, including POST Gallery (Novosibirsk), Apichatpong Weerasethakul Film Lecture Hall (Yekaterinburg), Noyabr Cinema (Moscow), Art Residence and Cultural Center (Izhevsk), Radio House (St. Petersburg), and venues in Finland, Germany, Mongolia, Turkey, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and India.
The program prepared for Garage explores video works that reflect on archives (both personal archives and found footage) and working with analogue media. It begins with voiced-over narrative diary films and gradually moves toward abstract films in the spirit of Jordan Belson.
The screening will be followed by a discussion of the program and the festival with VNUTRI curators Alexei Myslitsky, Yana Nokhrina, Zhon-Zhon Sandyr, Gleb Segeda, Ira Dmitrieva, Lana Bogdanovskaya, Yulia Lantsova, Nikita Ermolaev, and Andrei Makotinsky.
Moderator: Alisa Nasrtdinova, curator of the film program at Garage
- Alisia Svetik, Of Castles and Dragons, 2023, 12 min.
- Nastia Shinkaryuk, People Have Come Out Everywhere, 2021, 12 min.
- Anna Dmitrieva and Georg A. Murson, Mikhryutka, 2023, 3 min.
- Ekaterina Bronnikova, Anna, 2022, 5 min.
- Nikita Baranov, +7500 Frames, 2023, 5 min.
- Alina Yunusova, WB, 2023, 7 min.
- Sergei Nazarov, Another cities, 2023, 6 min.
- Alexei Myslitsky, I’m Shooting Fire, 2021–2023, 13 min.