The short film program is an echo of the 1st New Holland Island International Debut Film Festival and features three films by Russian directors: a film on masculinity in crisis that won an award in Locarno; a documentary portrait of Yuri and Maria Mamleev; and an experimental animation about a superhero from a tower block.
Leave of Absence
Russia in the 2010s. Artem, a man of few words (and whose name we learn only in the final credits), lives with a family he doesn’t love, works at a meat plant, and spends his evenings watching news of Russia’s military successes in Syria. Anton Sazonov's directorial debut is an aesthete’s study of life in Russia's tower blocks and an attempted existential exploration of Russian masculinity (and the so-called “deep nation”) in crisis.
Leave of Absence
Dir. Anton Sazonov
Russia, 2019. 12 min. 16+
News From the Other World
The Mamleev family portrait, set in the cramped interior of a small Moscow flat, is an experiment in metaphysical documentary making. Yury Mamleev, the great writer of the Russian chthonic, plays with a cat while his wife, the translator Maria Mamleeva, flips through a photo album from their émigré years in Paris and America. But something eerie seeps into these scenes of simple comfort, vaguely manifesting itself in the elliptical editing and the soundtrack’s unsettling, abstract humming.
News From the Other World
Dir. Valentina Bek
Russia. 2020. 28 min. 12+
Naked
The film takes place somewhere in Eastern Europe. Following an accident in a secret laboratory, the main character acquires superpowers that he doesn’t actually need: he doesn’t want to save the world, nor is he interested in fighting supervillains. All he desires is to be left alone. Kirill Khachaturov recreates an awkward, angular landscape of Russian modernity using his very own animation technique—photographic backdrops and crude 3D animation.
Naked
Dir. Kirill Khachaturov
Russia, 2019. 15 min. 16+
