КАТАЛОГ СATALOG

DOCU/АРТ DOCU/ART
Olha Birzul,
program coordinator
Bob Dylan once confessed that when he first
heard Elvis Presley’s music, he felt like he
had broken out of prison. A couple of years
ago, experimental documentaries became
a similarly unexpected territory of freedom
for me. More and more often, I caught myself
feeling a kind of aching excitement about
the fact that I not only see, but also feel
how, by using moving pictures and sound,
directors stretch time, squeeze space, drill
holes in my mind and shamelessly deceive
my tender heart.
It is no secret that in discussions about
documentary film theorists have long been
offering to use the wider term of nonfeature
cinema. And it broadens horizons
for all of us. Like a fresh air getting through
the open window different experiments
with the form, language and variety of
media is entering the documentary space.
Thus, the DOCU/ART program will fit the
central concept of the festival, and will be
dedicated to the topic of ‘The Illusion of
Genre.’ We will be shaking the established
notions about documentary films at the
traditional venues of Kyiv Cinema and
PinchukArtCentre. All three films presented
in the program are the stories about artists
and at the same time the experiments with
the form of the narrative.
For example, Olmo and the Seagull, by Petra
Costa and Lea Glob, is a hybrid film created
at the intersection of reality and fiction, in
which a spectator, together with the film’s
characters, drowns in the ambiguous reality
of theatrical actors, where life mixes with
acting, and Chekhov’s protagonists seep
into a reality of a pregnant woman. Sam
Klemke’s Time Machine, an ironic piece by
Matthew Bate, depicts over thirty years of
the life of an American video blogger, in
which a seemingly meaningless chronicle
of failures, total joy and uncovered truth
transforms into a philosophical essay that
literally blows the story up to the universal
scale. Probably the most elegant of the
three is The Show of Shows by Benedikt
Erlingsson, which would please cinephiles.
Accompanied by the musicians of Sigur Rós
the rarities and never-before seen footage
about cabaret, attractions, and circuses
reveals the nature of the eternal human
drive towards the spectacle and the illusion.
However it’s still about cinema. At the dawn
of its existence it was called differently –
Illusion.
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