Every year the Beat Film Festival gathers around itself fans of new music, fashion, cinema and art. For the first time since the start of the pandemic, the organizers returned to a large, two-week format. The festival, which started this week, will run until July 3. The screenings will take place not only in the main Moscow cinemas, as it was before, but in museums and galleries, including the fashionable GES-2 and the Multimedia Art Museum. Also, some of the films can be viewed on the Kinopoisk video service. The organizers already practiced the online format when the pandemic began, and they do not plan to abandon it yet.
The festival is especially interesting for its National Competition, which regularly presents young Russian authors who make topical films about the unknown aspects of our life. As always, the Beat Film Festival brings you the best screen non-fiction from around the world. Vedomosti tells about the main events of this year’s film festival.
Youth and rebellion
The name Beat Film Festival refers to the American beat generation of the 1950s, to the literature of rebels and innovators Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, to the jazz of Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman. And it is no coincidence: the festival program is imbued with the spirit of independent culture, and its main characters are musicians and directors, designers and IT specialists, contemporary art artists. The told stories of talented and extraordinary personalities are always an attempt to understand the past from today’s perspective. But the Beat Film Festival and its films, although they often look back at the experience of past generations, are nevertheless directed to the future.
The Beat Film Festival was first held in 2010. Its founders, a married couple Kirill Sorokin and Alena Bocharova, who previously worked in the music industry, did not plan to make the festival a regular event at all. The first show focused exclusively on films about and around music. The audience liked the format, the event became an annual event, and subsequently the Beat Film Festival expanded significantly thematically. And eventually grew into an event dedicated to modern urban and youth culture.
Inspired by the experience of the American South by Southwest, the main Mecca of independent culture, Sorokin and Bocharova began to arrange lectures, concerts and theme parties as part of the Beat Film Festival. Over time, the festival has become a significant and expected event in the cultural environment of the capital.
Perhaps no other Russian film festival that focuses exclusively on documentary films receives such attention and interest from the public. Last year, the festival was attended by more than 45,000 spectators – offline and online. The secret is that he has his own ideology and a very precisely chosen audience – young people who are interested in modernity.
Buryat underground and Moscow subway
An attempt to understand the present day and look into the future is the National Competition of the festival, which was first held in 2015. Every year, young documentary filmmakers become its participants, showing the non-obvious, sometimes marginal and unknown aspects of our life.
One of the first winners of the competition was the poetic journey through the Russian outback “Okay, good” by Alexandra Kulak and Anna Kornienko. In 2018, Hey Bro! won. – a portrait of two Moscow party-goers who are looking for themselves as life-savers. Subcultures occupy an important place in the documentaries of the National Competition. “Secondary World” by Alexander Pustynnov, winner of 2020, describes the everyday life of Russian geeks, collectors of video games and comics, fans of Japanese anime, and “Cracks” by Pavel Nikiforov, which received the Grand Prix the following year, illuminates the world of St. Petersburg street art.
Many finalists have visited prestigious European venues. “Raving Riot: Rave at the Parliament”, a film by Stepan Polivanov about a protest concert in Tbilisi, was shown at the Tate Modern in London. And the biopic about rapper Antokh MC “Heel-Toe” directed by Maxim Tomas got to the Rotterdam Festival.
45 000
viewers visited in 2021 Beat Film Festival offline and online
This year, a record number of films are participating in the program of the Beat Film Festival National Competition – 14 competitive and four out-of-competition films. Many of them do not last more than half an hour. Thematically, the tapes differ from each other, although it is easy to see something in common between them. The cornerstone theme of the current Beat Film Festival, perhaps, can be called “unknown Russia”. The competition features poetic documentaries about the Russian North – “Exit” and “All right, Pinega.” Next to them, you can put an experimental portrait of the village of Teriberka in the Murmansk region “About the Snow” and a mystical journey to the habitats of the Finno-Ugric peoples “How I Became a Beserman”.
A separate center of the National Program is the “place” in the broad sense of the word. A film about the creators of the iconic Moscow bar “Convivencia. Veladora, the story of the founding of the GES-2 gallery in the capital, Zal, an ode to the legendary Torpedo stadium demolished in 2021, each of these films in one way or another unfolds around a certain location that attracts young and talented people. The Moscow metro became the setting for “Where are we going?” Ruslan Fedotov, winner of the main world documentary film festival IDFA in 2021. This is a Time.news of the everyday life of the subway, consisting of small tragedies of train passengers hurrying about their business.
Other films of the competition deal with the theme of art in one way or another. Among them stand out “Exit through the yurt” – about the Moscow Buryat underground – and “Wild high” – a drama about the life of a disabled rapper from Novosibirsk, who dreams of becoming popular like Morgenstern (included in the register of foreign agents). The theme of unknown Russian art is continued by a film about the Kazan art group Prometheus, the first in the USSR to experiment with light music and design large-scale and bold technological installations.
The Russian program of the Beat Film Festival eloquently shows that we live in a country of untold stories and still know too little about the place we live in. Small independent pictures taken by enthusiasts on a smartphone allow us to meet people that we can pass on the street and not notice. And behind each of them stands a unique destiny, a story about which can become the basis for a festival short film.
Kubrick and a lot about music
In addition to showing Russian independent films, the Beat Film Festival traditionally brings a lot of foreign hits and the latest films about modern culture. This year, the international program has been significantly reduced compared to previous years, apparently due to the geopolitical situation in the world. However, as before, it still consists entirely of European and American tapes.
The key theme in the international program can be called the topic of communication, conversation. The festival opened with Jane Through Charlotte’s Eyes, a film-interview, a dialogue between Charlotte Gainsbourg and her legendary mother, Jane Birkin, who turned 75 last year. Two women are immersed in memories, singing and arguing about the eternal, trying to get to know each other again. About another cult figure tells “Kubrick about Kubrick”, a fresh look at the biography of the brilliant director. The documentary is based on hitherto unknown interviews with Stanley Kubrick, author of A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut, recorded by film critic Michel Siman.
The traditional center of the international program of the Beat Film Festival is music. This year, the tragic story of rapper XXXTentacion, who died at the height of his fame when he was 20, will be shown here. He became famous on the Internet for his unusual lyrics touching on mental health topics, and became one of the heroes of his generation. The film “Look at Me: XXXTentacion” is an attempt to reconstruct his short life and look at his work through the prism of biography, personal traumas and experiences.
Charlie XCX, another Internet star, is featured in the enthusiastic and inspiring film Charlie XCX: Alone Together. In it, the artist invites her fans to record a new album together in Zoom, thereby helping those who need it most at this moment to express themselves.
Standing apart in the program is the documentary “The Cow”, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021. The plot unfolds around one day in the life of the most ordinary cow Luma on the farm. Director Andrea Arnold, who directed the sensational film “American Cutie”, makes you feel sympathy for her heroine. In The Cow, the banal everyday life of a cow’s fate, which ends in a slaughterhouse, turns into an existential parable. Arnold does not seek to make her viewers vegetarians, her task is to change the attitude towards the animal, to see it feeling and alive.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the desire for freedom
The program of the Beat Film Festival will not do without audience hits of recent years. The top most popular film in the Beat Film Festival catalog for several years in a row has been B-Movie: The Sound and Fury in West Berlin. This is an exciting journey to the capital of Germany a few years before the fall of the Wall. Among the heroes are young Nick Cave and Tilda Swinton, ordinary Germans rushing to work or another night party. All this is accompanied by crazy musical experiments of underground artists and picturesque landscapes of old Berlin.
Another Beat Film Festival hit, “Rave in Iran”, is full of a similar atmosphere and energy. The film tells about the underground life of Tehran, about people who, under the threat of imprisonment, continue to organize illegal parties. This is a story about the thirst for freedom in the face of rigid borders and censorship. About the search for truth at the edge of the world tells “A Dog Called Money” – singer PJ Harvey’s journey to Kosovo, which is edited with footage of the recording of her latest album in the studio.
Don’t miss out on some of the big biopics. First of all, Basquiat: Explosion of Reality is a film about the life of the legendary artist, shot by the wife of director Jim Jarmusch. The picture is notable for the colorful atmosphere of New York in the 1970s, in which the lonely Haitian youth Jean-Michel Basquiat wanders, looking for himself in a cruel world. Scars of Ali Bulala tells the story of the crazy skateboarding culture of the 2000s, one of the symbols of which is the Swede Ali Bulala. The difficult fate of a skateboarder constantly led him to self-destruction, he was on the verge of death several times, but something miraculously saved him time after time.