One of the main attractions of MIFF will be the screening version of the whole season of six episodes of the TV a crime mystery story Top of the Lake: China Girl written by Jane Campion and Gerard Lee, and directed by Jane Campion and Ariel Kleiman (his parents, by the way, came to Australia from Odessa). Starring Nichole Kidman, Elisabeth Moss, Gwendoline Christie, Ewen Leslie, David Dencik and Alice Englert
And now to movies which might be of special interest to the Russian audience. First for buffs of Soviet movie classics – the groundbreaking, visually breathtaking Aelita, Queen of Mars was the first Soviet science fiction film. See it at MIFF with a soundtrack and score by The Spheres in collaboration with Kinotopia.
A new director Andrey Zvyagintsev powerful drama Loveless was awarded top prize at the Munich Film Festival as well as the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. In Russia it premiered on June 1, 2017. The previous works of Zvyagintsev - Elena (2011) and "Leviathan" (2014) also had a great international success, but in Russia were exposed to sharp criticism, including from the Minister of Culture who even threatened to leave the director without state financial support.
Another Russian film shown in Melbourne is Closeness. MIFF program warns audience that the movie contains archival footage of real killings, so please be aware. Family relations intermingle with ethnic tensions in this stunning, disturbing debut from the young Russian filmmaker Kantemir Balagov. It is set in the late 1990s, in a Jewish enclave within a mostly-Muslim region of the Caucasus. Russian master Aleksandr Sokurov acted as the artistic director of the project.
Hostages by the Georgian director Rezo Rezo Gigineishvili for the first time was shown this year at the Berlinale. It is based on a real story from 1983 when a group of young dissidents – many from privileged professional backgrounds – who decide to hijack a flight at gunpoint and force the plane to land in Turkey. But everything has gone not the way they have planned.
And the last movie deserving a few words is the new work of the classic of modern cinema Sergey Loznitsa A Gentle Creature . The movie is a joint production of France, Ukraine, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Russia, and is very losely based on the motives of the story of the same name byFyodor Dostoyevsky. This year the film was selected for the main program of the 70th Cannes international Film Festival but received mixed reviews. But among disapproving responses from critics and the audience it also gained a wide ranging acceptance as uncompromising and powerful movie painting a gloomy, mordant portrait of the social and spiritual decay of modern-day Russia.
Please find full MIFF program here
