It also happens that fragments of one film are scattered in different places, and then the archivist has to put them together, recreating the original author’s intention.
There are many such stories.
A festival of archival films gives viewers an amazing opportunity to become acquainted with the secrets of the history of cinema, to experience the joy of becoming familiar with the true values of the past, which then become the values of the present.
In the program of reconstructions of the 2021 festival, we have collected films from different eras, from the "primitives" of the early 20th century to the works of our contemporaries.
Here we find “Judith and Holofernes”, an early work by Louis Feuillade, the future director of the famous serial “Fantômas’, so beloved by the avant-garde artists of the 1920s in France and the Soviet Union.
A whole selection of early Italian films, united by the name of the poet Torquato Tasso includes two biographical films about him and a film adaptation of his poem "Jerusalem Delivered", made by the famous director of historical "action films" Enrico Guazzoni in 1910.
Among the works of our compatriots is the unfinished film of one of the brightest figures of Lenfilm studio and of all Russian cinema, Dinara Asanova, "The Stranger" (1985), as well as the restored "Moloch" by Aleksandr Sokurov.
The program also includes two films by Nutsa Gogoberidze, one of the first Georgian (and Soviet) women directors, “Buba” and “Desperate Valley” (“Ujmuri”). She was also a co-director of the first film by the famous Mikhail Kalatozov, “Their Kingdom”.
We will see for the first time the unfinished film by Margarita Barskaya, "Father and Son" (1936), in which she demonstrated her amazing ability to work with children in a way that no one else has been able to do.
We will also see the digital restoration of the film-experiment by Rustam Khamdamov, "Vocal Parallels" (2005), based on the script by Renata Litvinova and featuring her.
And, finally, the audience will see “A Long Happy Life”, which exists in the minds of the modern viewer as a legend: the only film as a director of Gennady Shpalikov, one of the most famous poets of the Thaw period.
Nikolai Izvolov