Largo Ma Non Tanto

Sirens drone over the city, announcing a state of emergency involving “disturbance of the electromagnetic field”, while individuals clandestinely fiddle with soldered bits of leftover technology. The cyberpunk mode of dystopian science fiction did not end in the 1990s; thanks to the pandemic and other crises, it’s back – with a vengeance. Alexandra Karelina’s film, superbly shot by Egor Protsko, treats this genre in an experimental way, flashing cryptic images and offering bottomless scenarios of social breakdown.

“For a very long time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a dream,” she said.
But even they, enjoying the beautiful park, hardly notice the planes roaring overhead from a nearby military base.

The film about the legend of Japanese experimental rock Keiji Haino reveals the veil of mystery surrounding the musician for all 50 years of his career. Haino's reflections on music, culture and life, recorded after a performance in Moscow in November 2019, are interspersed with fragments of the performance itself.

A short film about a foreshadowed trauma that turned out to be a transformative experience. A nameless girl gazes into the frail world, and a blow beyond all bearing forces her to change. Symbolic footage brings about a deep plunge into sensory experience of change, loss, pain, and trust.

The film’s main protagonists are household items of the 1950s-1970s shot on film. Their path goes from the written to the erased. From the clear to the forgotten. Obsession with the past — this is their space. The images gradually become and blurred down to pure emotion. Nothing can be saved, and it is impossible to return anywhere. This is a film where the characters take the stage for the last time.

Five of the six heroes of the film came to Kazan from different parts of the earth to go beyond their fear and for the first time openly declare their HIV status by running a marathon in a special uniform. For Deanna, who flew in from Australia with her 70-year-old mother, talking about her diagnosis is a daily job throughout her life. She is an example for the American Sean, who prepared for the "coming out" long and carefully. Seam is sure that his parents in an Indonesian village will hardly ever know about his participation in the Open Faces team in distant Kazan. Zhandos, a young doctor from Kazakhstan, only worries about how the news will affect his mother.

A photo film about the seamy side of propaganda, the glorification of war and the normalization of violence. The characters recite phrases from the last children's book by the poet Alexander Vvedensky, after which he was repressed and killed. The chamber format of viewing through an amateur photo projector, where the audible is refracted into the visible, refers to Soviet radio plays.