The Desert of Forbidden Art

Opening today: The Desert of Forbidden Art, directed by Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev

Synopsis from the film's official website:

How does art survive in a time of oppression? During the Soviet rule artists who stay true to their vision are executed, sent to mental hospitals or Gulags.

Their plight inspires young Igor Savitsky. He pretends to buy state-approved art but instead daringly rescues 40,000 forbidden fellow artists’ works and creates a museum in the desert of Uzbekistan, far from the watchful eyes of the KGB. Though a penniless artist himself, he cajoles the cash to pay for the art from the same authorities who are banning it. Savitsky amasses an eclectic mix of Russian avant-garde art. But his greatest discovery is an unknown school of artists who settle in Uzbekistan after the Russian revolution of 1917, encountering a unique Islamic culture, as exotic to them as Tahiti was for Gauguin. They develop a startlingly original style, fusing European modernism with centuries-old Eastern traditions.

Ben Kingsley, Sally Field and Ed Asner voice the diaries and letters of Savitsky and the artists. Intercut with recollections of the artists’ children and rare archival footage, the film takes us on a dramatic journey of sacrifice for the sake of creative freedom. Described as “one of the most remarkable collections of 20th century Russian art” and located in one of the world's poorest regions, today these paintings are worth millions, a lucrative target for Islamic fundamentalists, corrupt bureaucrats and art profiteers. The collection remains as endangered as when Savitsky first created it, posing the question of whose responsibility is it to preserve this cultural treasure.

Perestroika

Showing at the Edinburgh FIlm Festival: Perestroika, directed by Sarah Turner

Synopsis from the EIFF website:

Blurring the boundary between reality and fiction, Perestroika retraces a journey made exactly 20 years previously, in an attempt to come to terms with the death of a close friend. Hypnotic and haunting imagery and evocative soundscapes draw the viewer into a mysterious space of reflection, caught between past and present. The journey itself – which interweaves footage from the original trip – becomes a metaphor for the process of remembering and reexperiencing.

Russian Lessons

Showing at Sundance: Russian Lessons, directed by Olga Konskaya and Andrei Nekrasov

Synopsis from the Sundance website:

Andrei Nekrasov, with directing partner Olga Konskaya, returns to Sundance with a formidable documentary that energetically delves into the violent and bewildering conflicts in the Caucasus, with Russia pitted against the former Soviet state of Georgia, and involving Georgia’s troubled regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Boldly visiting conflict zones rarely filmed, the codirectors uncover damning evidence of Russian violence, incidents whose few recorded images are often reprocessed in mass-media reports as evidence of other people’s crimes (often, supposedly, residents of Georgia).

Parsing the complex history of the region, as well as oversimplified cultural assumptions about internecine ethnic conflicts, Nekrasov and Konskaya construct a portrait of a cynical Russia willing to engage in secret wars and manufacture conflicts and media reports simply to consolidate power. With immediacy and passion, but also with a commanding mastery of film form, their documentary dignifies the struggles of powerless people and holds a sobering mirror up to a superpower and its media.

My Perestroika

Showing at Sundance: My Perestroika, directed by Robin Hessman

Synopsis from the Sundance website:

The Bolshevik revolution, the cold war, and the collapse of the Soviet Union defined the history of the twentieth century. With such a past, what does it mean to be Russian today? Robin Hessman's lovingly crafted documentary, My Perestroika, adopts the idea of the “everyman story,” suggesting that the unheralded lives of the last generation of Soviets to grow up behind the iron curtain hold the key to understanding the contradictions of modern Russia from the inside out.

Crafted during five years of researching and shooting, and based on almost a decade of living in Russia in the 1990s, Hessman's film poetically interweaves an extraordinary trove of home movies, Soviet propaganda films, and intimate access to five schoolmates whose linked, but very different, histories offer a moving portrait of newly middle-class Russians living lives they could never have imagined when they were growing up.

The film's official site is here, and its Facebook page is here.No trailer on YouTube, but here is an interview with Robin Hessman.

Melody for a Street Organ

Showing at the Toronto International Film Festival: Melody for a Street Organ, directed by Kira Muratova

Synopsis from the TIFF website:

Two strangely clad children walk the city streets on Christmas Eve as falling snow gently envelops everything in a powdery layer of magic. The pale-skinned youths look like a cross between dethroned royalty and homeless bums: the boy wears a luxuriously patterned coat and the girl a delicate muff, while both sport striking dark circles under their eyes.

It is a deep, dark night and Alena (Lena Kostyuk) and Nikita (Roma Burlaka) are alone after the death of their mother. Her meagre bequests – a princely coat made of curtain fabric and a queenly muff knit with loving care – are all the protection her children have against the world. Terrified at the thought of being separated, the stepbrother and stepsister board a train in search of their fathers in the big, bad city.

Kira Muratova spins her majestic web slowly and purposefully, weaving together alternating vignettes of her beloved duo. This fairy-tale world is not conjured out of thin air, but rather gives us a different take on what's already there: a train station haunted with the memory of a long-lost father; a department store doubling as Ali Baba's cave and the nine circles of hell; a clandestine street that refuses to be found. On their bizarre journey, the children discover endless rows of houses posing as shop windows to a vast array of lifestyles, with each door representing a different version of what we know and love: friends, family and shelter. But these motherless waifs are thrown out of every building.

Succumbing to Muratova's charming mercilessness, the stepsiblings learn their lesson over and over again: though we wish they could both live happily ever after, some people can never really find a place to call home.