The program is composed of four short films, the winners of the festival’s national competition in the categories Best Film, Best Director, Audience Choice, and Special Jury Mention, as well as the picture that received a special mention at the festival.
The national competition jury was the director and video artist Ekaterina Selenkina, curator Dmitry Frolov, and cultural theorist and producer Manny de Guerre. The awards ceremony took place at Garage Auditorium on October 25.
The Year of the White Moon
This is a heart-wrenching chronicle of a relationship between a superstitious mother from Yekaterinburg, and her homosexual son, who has moved to Moscow. The protagonists are never seen onscreen: we can only hear their telephone conversations. The Year of the White Moon is the winner of the 18th Spirit of Fire Festival and the National Competition of the Moscow International Experimental Film Festival.
The Year of the White Moon
Director: Maxim Pecherskiy
Russia, 2020. 21 min. 16+
Sulus
Tuyara is fighting for custody over her son Sulus. Exhausted by the divorce, she conspires with her lawyer to kidnap the child. However, Sulus’s father is a cop, and the courtroom drama slowly grows into a thriller.
Sulus
Director: Anastasia Borisova
Russia, 2019. 18 min. 16+
Ecology Lesson
In Yekaterinburg, developers are planning to build a mall in the place of a park near a school. Teacher Ivan Kovalyov—a dedicated environmentalist—puts up a tent in the park where his biology class now takes place. His colleagues are skeptical of his idea.
Ecology Lesson
Director: Ivan Sosnin
Russia, 2019. 19 min. 12+
RIO
Polina is an administrator and Nadya is a cleaner in the Anna Kern Hotel on the Finnish border. Few guests spend more than a night at the hotel, but one day a good-looking man comes to stay… Dreams are mixed with real-life events and quotes from Attenberg by Athina Rachel Tsangari in the eccentric film scored by the French collective La Femme.
RIO
Director: Zhenia Kazankina
Russia, 2019. 20 min. 16+
Seemed
One morning, a physics teacher Aleksandr Aksyonov discovers a huge pair of buttocks in his garden. But in Nizhnie Derbyshki, competing for the title of the best small town in the country, nobody else seems to want to notice the potentially dangerous object. Baibulat Batullin offers his cheeky take on the classical story about the conflict between an individual and the state.
Seemed
Director: Baibulat Batullin
Russian, 2020. 12 min. 16+