Garage Screen and Beat Film Festival—the international festival of documentaries on music and new culture—have designed a special program of screenings for Garage Screen summer cinema in Gorky Park.
The program features films that undermine the existent canons of documentary filmmaking by rejecting, explicitly or covertly, the idea of fixing reality in favor of the production of new narratives and meanings. A retro sci-fi novel about the end of mankind illustrated with the shoots of brutalist monuments in the former Yugoslavia; contemporary takes on the stories of freedom and oppression arising around the Berlin Wall segments dispersed across the US; the everyday lives of a community of rappers who escape to live in the desert but remain Internet-addicted; a chronicle of one day in the life of a godforsaken bar which doesn’t actually exist, as its regulars are played by actors. Reality that thinned out in the era of post-truth and media networks was given another glitch with the onset of the pandemic—and documentary cinema is looking for new ways to make statements about the new world where the tactile is mixed with the virtual and history is happening before our eyes.