Alexandr Starikov

A modern fairy tale with scientists, partisans, cosmonauts, officials, and the Motherland. The scientist and his assistant are collecting the ingredients for an elixir that can resurrect dead people to life. At the same time, officials are looking for the carpenter who has a power to transmute water into oil.

Rain does not caress the skin, the wind resists blowing, a soul is like a doll forgotten in the house of glass. Tikhon Pendurin’s piece “Death of Cinema” is a dream of a film, the process of falling asleep, a frozen cosmos, the liturgy of a sigh. Fotogénie, a return to the forgotten magic of magician Segundo de Chomon, the mystery of Val del Omar, Alain Resnais surreal theatricality “Death of Cinema” seems to absorb all the magic of cinema and confesses its own forgetfulness. The characters of “Death of Cinema” stand before the justice of truth, naive children turned with pride away from the audience. Here, the main thing is the hallucination of light, a whisper, a prayer, the bewildered physiognomy of cinema, which allowed itself to laugh at its own seriousness. (by Karina Karaeva)

All day long the TV shows an ice-hole. Ice-holes are the theme of the day, a winter tradition that unites believers and sportsmen, stars and walruses, the president and the unemployed. In the centre of the news reports are the topics of Baptism, fishing and the criminal chronicle. The president and a pike, the artist and the crit- ics, the oligarch and the law enforcement team – they all meet at an ice- hole in search of solutions for their problems. The jobless Muscovite, with bad habits, dives down an ice-hole for a wife, just like Sadko. The fairy- tale plots intertwine with documentary context, and it is no longer clear where reality ends. Remember Nietzsche: if you long gaze into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.

In the small town of Kansk, the Krasnoyarsk Territory many years in a row there is an international festival of short experimental films, which has a strong reputation throughout the world. "Russia as a dream" is an international project, shot by a team of authors and united directors, artists, poets. Each of the guests of the 14th International Kan Video Festival held in 2015 was invited to participate in the creation of a general film, the theme of which was the relationship of man and landscape, civilization and nature, reality and sleep.

Russia has a surfeit of overqualified graduates. Nastya Sokolova is one of them. Her career, if you can call it that, gave her a plethora of unexpected work experiences: from desk slave in banking to head bookkeeper of an illegal brothel. The film’s eight tableaus detail the various workplaces, colleagues and situations. To finish it off: deadpan commentary.

Tinnitus is the hearing of sound when no external sound is present. While often described as ringing, it may also sound like a clicking, hiss or roaring. The film is supposed to be the first one dedicated to music as an instrument for death exploration.