Walking the line

This year’s Message to Man film festival pushes its borders to include drama theater.

By Galina Stolyarova

The St. Petersburg Times

Published: September 19, 2012 (Issue # 1727)

FOR SPT A still from ‘Zavtra’ (Tomorrow), about the protest art group Voina.

Message To Man, Russia’s only international festival of documentary, animated and short non-documentary films, kicks off on Sept. 22, pushing its boundaries and embracing drama theater. Two cutting-edge theater companies — Moscow’s Teatr.doc and Belguim’s Liege Theater Festival — will present some of their most recent and much-discussed productions.

The festival was originally established to provide Russian documentary makers with a stepping-stone to the international film scene, and has been a springboard for young and up-and-coming film directors since it was first held in 1988.

The 22nd Message To Man event continues to focus on documentaries, while showcasing, for the first time in its history, a series of drama performances.

 The festival’s venues include Rodina movie theater, Dom Kino and the Erarta Museum of Modern Art. Hosting the theatrical part of the festival will be the legendary Lenfilm, Russia’s oldest film studio. On September 23 and 24, Pavilion No. 1 will welcome audiences to the Russian premiere of Lars Noren’s staging of “Le 20 Novembre,” a coproduction of the Liege Theater Festival and the Belgium National Theater. The production, which will be performed in German with simultaneous translation provided,  was inspired by the diary of a murderer, a young man living in a small German town, who goes on to kill his former classmates and teachers, and then ends his own life. The sobering diary sheds light on the darkest corners of the human soul.

Politics takes center stage at Teatr.doc’s production, “One Hour and 18 Minutes,” directed by Mikhail Ugarov and dedicated to the final hours of the life of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in Moscow’s Matrosskaya Tishina detention center in November 2009.

Documentary theater is very new to Russia. The Magnitsky production is only the second experiment of its kind, the first one being Teatr.doc’s project “September.doc,” which was loosely based on the notes that appeared on message boards after the school hostage crisis in Beslan in 2004. The staging can be seen on September 25.

For the people behind Message to Man, individuals and human life are sacred. The project’s ideologists are convinced that the more personalities there are in the world, the better a place it will be. The name of the Message to Man festival has also become its mission. It refers to the Bible and reflects the essence of the festival’s purpose: Faith, hope, love, grace and compassion — eternal human values that we need in life, as well as in films.

In the years since it was launched, Message To Man has been diverse enough to incorporate films about aged Eskimo hunters, Swedish authors and refugees starting new lives. In 2001, the controversial German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s documentaries on the Nazis, “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia” were shown, with Riefenstahl, then aged 98, coming to St. Petersburg to enjoy a standing ovation during one screening.

The festival was initially held once every two years, but has developed into an annual event. Since 1995, the premieres have been shown in a separate competition.

FOR SPT Jail features in ‘Zavtra’ (above) and in Teatr.doc’s Magnitsky production.

Many of the films shown at the festival have rarely been screened and cannot easily be found anywhere else in Russia. During its history, the festival has created a fascinating collection of more than 28,000 films that have been shown at it.

The event’s anthropocentric philosophy has been carefully preserved by the festival’s president, the renowned Russian filmmaker Alexei Uchitel.

This year, the festival reaches out to audiences regarded as outcasts: Sept. 27 sees a film screening at the Kresty pre-trial detention center. The inmates will be treated to Sergei Miroshnichenko’s film “Born in the USSR: 29 years,” followed by a meeting with the director.

At the height of perestroika, Miroshnichenko started filming seven-year-olds for a documentary project in which the children were asked about the things that affected them, what they were afraid of, interested in, excited about or what they hoped for. The director asked his young interviewees if they believed in God, or cared about politics. The project developed as the director and his team returned to their main characters every seven years, and documented their emotional and spiritual evolution. The evening in Kresty will feature part four of the series, in which the characters are 28 years old. They live in different countries now, have different jobs, are of different ethnic origins, and perhaps the only thing that unites them is that they were all born in the political giant that was the U.S.S.R.

Uchitel admits that the festival is surviving against the odds. This year, the festival is being held as part of the Third St. Petersburg Kinoforum that has become an umbrella for several local film events, from the student film festival Nachalo to the International St. Petersburg Film Festival, which will have its debut this fall.

“To say that we are going against the grain is not enough: Every year I get the impression that we are teetering on the edge of a financial catastrophe,” the filmmaker said. “Raising funds for a non-commercial film event is a Herculean task. Very sadly, in Russia, art house films as well as original domestic films interest hardly anyone, from producers to the authorities, and from potential sponsors to potential spectators. The appetite for what we have been doing is, unfortunately, scarce.”

The festival this year will feature six gala-premieres of non-fiction full-length films. The highlights include James Marsh’s “Project Nim” (U.K., U.S.), a heartbreaking story about an attempt in the 1970s to bring up a chimpanzee baby like a child; Dali Rust’s film “Marina’s House” (Lithuania) about Andrei Tarkovsky’s sister Marina; “900 Days” (Holland), Jessica Gorter’s reflections on the Siege of Leningrad; and Andrei Gryazev’s film “Tomorrow” (Russia) about the protest art group Voina.

Message to Man is divided into international and national competitions. The international jury, which always features a winner of one of the previous events, awards the Golden Centaur Grand Prix and several Centaur prizes. A total of 120 films will compete for the prizes.

Message to Man runs through Sept. 29. For a full program, visit the festival’s website at message2man.com/