Garage and Beat Film Festival unveil Films by Artists program featuring films made by artists.
Films by Artists is a Garage Screen project with Beat Film Festival featuring four films at the boundary of cinema and video art made by video artists, anthropologists, and performance artists. Held in the new Garage Screen summer cinema, the program will be accompanied by artist talks with the films’ directors and experts.
The program launches on May 26 with the Russian premiere of Manifesto (2016) by German artist Julian Rosefeldt. In this film version of his multi-channel video installation, actress Cate Blanchett performs the most important manifestos of the twentieth century as a series of monologues in which she transforms into thirteen different people. The film is distributed by A-One Films and Russian World Vision, and will be released in Russia on June 8.
Next in line comes the documentary that made quite a splash, Liberation Day, chronicling the sensational concert of Slovenian art-rockers Laibach in Pyongyang—musicians from the western world exploring the limits of freedom in the totalitarian dictatorship of North Korea. The screening, supported by the Embassy of Kingdom of Norway in Russia, will be preceded by a talk between Beat Film Festival curator Yuri Saprykin, journalist Nina Nazarova who covered the concert for Afisha, the top lifestyle outlet, and Norwegian media artist Morten Traavik.
Italian video artist and director Yuri Ancarani will present The Challenge, a documentary luxury travelogue into the world of the extreme wealth of the Qatari “golden youth”—falconry, gold studded iPhones, and a cheetah in a Lamborghini—that’s just part of one weekend in the posh desert.
Before the screening, the director (his visit is supported by the Embassy of Italy in Russia) will meet with Italian curator Antonio Geusa.
Members of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Laboratory (those behind the fascinating documentary Leviathan) use the most experimental cinema techniques in their latest title Somniloquies, directed by Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. The viewer is plunged into the dreams of “the world’s most prolific sleep talker,” New York songwriter Dion McGregor. The directors use audio recordings of McGregor’s dream talk as a soundtrack to accompany the distorted worlds of people’s dreams.
