Presence over Moscow

Set in Nizhny Tagil, Russia, Summer journeys nostalgically through the warm middle-Ural summer with eight-year-old Vadim and his half-sister Christina. They enjoy evening festivities with their older teenage friends by the fire, go on mellow skateboard rides, and have a quiet daytime nap in the garden house. Caressed by the sun and the warmth of his relatives, hidden in the quiet tranquillity of the garden and far away from the cruelty of the outside world, Vadim enjoys his childhood days. Acting as a serene lullaby that mimics the movements of a gentle breeze, Summer provides warmth, joy and solace, offering hope and strength for the future.

The sea, the cliffs, the boats. A couple of Russian friends come to visit the filmmaker in exile in France. Glimpsed in the distance or invading the screen – the shimmer of the waves is everywhere.

The movie was shot at the junction of documentary and fiction films. The film takes the viewer into the late Ural summer of 2019 and immerses us in the real life of today's youth, with all its uncertainty, fragility, pain, despair and aspirations.

Four high school graduates meet for the first time after the death of their poet friend Sonya. They wander through an empty summer town, trying to reconnect and become closer to each other. A day, split by the past, turns into an apocalyptic mystery at night, where Sonya's elusive presence becomes increasingly tangible.

The film is built at the junction between reality and fiction. The famous Russian TV presenter Otar Kushanashvili goes blind and falls out of the stream of days. He gets into the circumstances offered to him, and those, in turn, become more and more real. There are people around him playing themselves, but losing their spontaneity in front of the camera. The camera is a cold and unblinking TV eye and its cavalier is a demiurgic montage that subordinates essentially neutral material. The dialogue around the improvised core is built between sound and image, between visible and invisible. This is the gap between television and cinema, between documentaries and literature.

Artist Salvatore Del Deo arrived in Provincetown, a small town in Massachusetts, as a young man in the 1940s and never left. This is the story of a town seen through an artist’s eyes, an elegy for bygone days.