A “flickering film project” “9 girls on the edge of reality” was presented in Moscow, created in the Sverdlovsk region by young directors, exclusively girls, under the direction of Andrei Silvestrov. Then he will travel across the country.
Silvestrov is a video artist, director and producer of the films Birmingham Ornament 1-2 (co-authored with Yuri Leiderman), Russia Like a Dream, Cast, Ice Hole, author of multimedia projects, once curator of the Cannes Video Festival in the Krasnoyarsk Territory. When his “Cast” came out, such a definition was made – a cross-media work, suggesting a symbiosis of fine arts, dance, music and cinema. Andrey was looking for a special plasticity of different eras related to the world order. In part, this experience was repeated now in the works of his students.
Last summer, in Sysert near Yekaterinburg, where the writer Bazhov was born, and now an interesting cultural space has appeared in an abandoned pre-revolutionary iron foundry (they produced engines for washing machines there in Soviet times), a film laboratory called “Locals” was held. Andrey Silvestrov became one of its curators. His wards were supposed to get to know the locals, see their eyes, multiplied by their own, the place in which they ended up, and make a film about it. From the fragments, a whole was formed, according to the definition of the authors of the project, “empathy for the flickering reality.” Reality and mirage resulted in a collective “cast of the molten summer of 2022”.
If you try to count nine works, then the goal may not be achieved. The novels flow into each other, some are so fleeting that they seem to be part of something else, you don’t feel them as something separate. Others, on the contrary, seem to be drawn out, but then it turns out that there are several of them, not just one.
“The shooting has begun, if anything,” the voice of one of the participants in the project sounds, and this intonation will determine the further movement. We are who we are. There will be silhouettes of girls in sundresses. Like ghosts, they shimmer in the dark forest, reminiscent of the souls of the dead in Hollywood movies. It turns out that the goblin living in the cemetery of the Old Believers will confuse the paths. This is how Bazhov’s tale “Cat’s Ears” is dissected by director Daria Dyachok. The usual heroes of Olga Peretyakova’s documentary films come to replace them. For 18 minutes, they study the cracks in the earth among the beautiful Ural landscapes. Cracks are everywhere – on the pavement, sculpture … Everything is so beautiful, even the heads of people sticking out of the water. And the conversations are incomprehensible. Young people are examining the contents of test tubes, listening to speeches by Ural University professor Sergei Tagiltsev. And suddenly a black-and-white movie begins, where the girl draws circles and lines on her face, on her hands, resembling cracks in the earth.
25-minute “Rite / Sysert” by Polina Mantsurova, who has experience of working at the festival of modern choreography and in the center. Meyerhold, – an imitation of the ceremony of seeing off to the army (a consultant on recruiting ceremonies worked in the picture). In parallel, there are conversations about death: “Do you think there is something there?” – “I was not there”. “We live once in a lifetime. I don’t want to die young.” Young guys living in Sysert say that they have already buried their friends, that they have dead classmates. One of the guys talks about what will happen to the family if he is killed or injured. Someone remembers how they didn’t hear anything for a month when a shell exploded nearby. Where were they? Nothing is said about this.
Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” sounds, and we are at the Sysert registry office. This is the “Bride” by Maria Rubina. A multi-screen movie begins, a girl in a national costume appears, jokes sound, the Ural crying of the bride. In parallel, the director asks an elderly woman about her wedding.
Some characters move from novel to novel. And now the old woman, already familiar to us, leads a round dance in Olga Belousova’s Lullaby for a Summer Landscape. Girls in sundresses sing ditties in a forest clearing. And the grandmother says that her two brothers are in Ukraine, their family is good, friendly. She invites a girl with a camera for tea, there is no one else to drink it with. Dresses in which the beauties sang at the edge, from her chests. Once she went to concerts. When it was? God knows.
One of the novice directors, as they say now, came to Sysert without a script, but wanted to shoot a road movie. Then you get lost in conjectures: either he talks about himself, or about a real or fictional heroine. Her parents worked in the zone. My father was a security guard, he was imprisoned for taking bribes. All life has passed there, and now Sysert is perceived as a prison. But even this moment will quickly evaporate, again, out of nowhere, brides, the registry office will appear. The young director did not know what to shoot about, and shot infinity. Or maybe not she at all, but one of her project colleagues. That’s how everything is set up here. And we are already going on an excursion, accompanied by a local resident, showing an abandoned dining room as a landmark.
The laboratory participants graduated from different film schools. Someone has an architectural and journalistic education, an interesting experience of creative work. They live in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Astrakhan, Yekaterinburg. Sysert is an absolutely new place for them (such is the initial setting), and they saw and showed it as if the whole country was concentrated on a small patch of land.
Newspaper headline:
9 girls in search of meaning