Date :                         27 July-3August
Place :                       St.Petersburg

The 8th OPEN CINEMA is going to take place in St.Petersburg at the turn of July and August.  Traditionally the film screenings will cover a wide range of short films by authors from Russia, Asia, America, Western Europe, Scandinavia, the Balkans and even Africa. As usual, the festival will be opened by a mass open-air at the beach of the Peter and Paul’s fortress; on the 27th and 28th of Julythere will be music and art programs as well as an hours-long marathon of audience’s favorite short and animated films 2012.

THEME: METROPOLIS AND ETERNITY

As we all know, prophecies of various cultures predict the humanity to face the Apocalypses in 2012. This obviously cannot be considered a coincidence but no one wants to play with the popular myth of the end of the world. On the contrary, we would like to share the anticipation and the mood of the times of change. The theme of the 8th Open Cinema Festival was born from understanding of the urgent issues facing by the world today and from the filmmakers’ statements and tendencies of the movies of this season.

Festival headline emerged from the two semantically significant concepts: Metropolis andEternity. Metropolis (from the Greek metrópolis  - “the main city”) as an industrial Babylon, a home of millions, a symbol of the dominating technocratic civilization and government’s suppression of a man, a sign of the social and existential crisis, it opposes the Eternity, which is a cosmic background for the dramatic developments, a symbol of an invisible and infinite Spirit or just the sky above.

METROPOLIS

85 years ago a German director Fritz Langgave the world something that changed the cinema forever. A film – prophecy, one of the greatest motion pictures of our time “Metropolis”, a great metaphoric anti-utopia. Created in 1927, this movie has significantly influenced the development of the world cinema and was included in the list of the 45 greatest films of all times, drawn up in Vatican for the hundredth anniversary of the cinema.

“Metropolis” is especially relevant now in the era of the world economy and power crisis, the era of hatred and revolutions, the era of humanitarian erosion of personality, inner and outer mutations of all of us in the face of cynical and pragmatic reality. Things happening  in Russia and the rest of the world make “Metropolis” a highly up-to-date message for the majority of intelligent people, turning their lives into anti-utopia and grotesque. The same caption appears in the beginning and in the end of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis”: “«There can be no understanding between the hands and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator».

ETERNITY

The number 8 in the name of the festival has coincided with the year of the world’s turning point, the frontier behind which we can face both failure and a new turn on the spiral of evolution, but it’s not over yet. The shape of the number 8 reminds the hourglass that counts down the lifetime, and becomes the symbol of the eternity when looked at from another angle. We cannot help but remember Ouroboros, the ring-shaped serpent eating its own tale – one of the most ancient symbols of infinity, the image of eternal cycle of life and death, the unity of spirituality and the frailty of life. In a  short life one can manage to realize himself as a part of this circle and throw his word, voice, note, shadow or light into its flow. To understand the Infinity might mean to feel the pulse or the panel of Reality, to find oneself on the crossroads of logic, intuition, the past and the future, at the point of creation and paradox – in other words, in the very Heart.

WHAT THE FILMS ARE ABOUT

The plots and meanings of most shorts sent to OPEN CINEMA this year are manifested in the aesthetics and the dystopian fantasies on the verge of absurd. Filmmakers refer to such topics as anxiety for one’s destiny in the society, alienation. They protest against the manipulation of minds, irony of social fairy-tales with archetypical characters, meaningless of life, going beyond life’s boundaries to the place where the Eternity awaits.



THE WINNER OF THE CANNES FESTIVAL AND OTHERS

“Silent”, a shortfilm by Turkish director Rezan Yeşilbaş (Palme d’Or Court Metrage-2012) is certainly going to be a pearl of this year competition. Also the audience is going to see London shortfilm festival winner “Compulsion” by Andrew McVicar (the United Kingdom), Sundance festival jury prize “The Return” by Blerta Zeqiri (Kosovo), Oscar nominee for best animated short “Wild Life” by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby, and many other remarkable films already noted at reputable European festivals such as Locarno, Oberhausen, Annecy, Clermont-Ferrand, Edinburgh and Glasgow.


DIRECTORATE OF THE FESTIVAL

Festival President – Lyudmila Lipeiko
Festival Director – Tamara Larina
Head of the expert council – Irina Evteeva
Feedback: Elizaveta Syomicheva, Head of the PR and media service of the festival