Punto y Raya Festival, the benchmark event for abstract film and animation, arrives for the first time in Russia with the Best of PyR 2018 program.
The selection features the 18 finalist and awarded films from the festival’s latest edition in Poland. They encompass a remarkable variety of approaches and techniques: from hand-drawn animation with pen and paper to top-notch generative art; from traditional stop-motion or video-feedback to silent 16mm film developed in matcha tea.
The evolution of abstract film and animation over the past century resonates deeply with some of the main concerns in Russian pictorial traditions such as Suprematism and Constructivism. When the sound and visual tracks work cohesively, viewers may tend to introspection or gaze beyond the film in search of poetry and meaning. In contrast, when artists employ dissonance or produce a constant stream of novel situations, they can hijack viewers’ senses and trap them inside the film from beginning to end.
Launched in 2007 by the Barcelona non-profit association MAD, Punto y Raya invites people around the world to explore pure form, motion, color and sound, avoiding direct representation. It recaptures the spirit of Cinéma Pur and Absolute Film formulated by the European avant-garde in the 1920s, exploring this unique artform at the intersection of fine art and media.
This film screening has been organized with the support of the Instituto Cervantes in Moscow.
