7000 Submissions to M2M
…meaning the St. Petersburg festival Message to Man that holds its 26th edition September 25 to October 10… The competition programmes were announced today, for long and short documentaries, for short animated and short fiction films, for experimental works for the national documentary competition. There is quite a lot to choose from, last year I went for the national competition, let’s see what will appeal to me this year, where I will attend for some days after a distribution conference for Nordic and Russian documentarians with the title ”How to Reach the Audience” taking place the 23rd and 24th of September. Responsible is producer Viktor Skubey.
Some words about the long documentaries, where I (among 10 films in competition) am happy to find Ognjen Glavonic’s Serbian ”Depth Two”, Helena Trestikova’s ”Mallory”, ”Manor” (photo) by Canadian Pier-Luc Latulippe and Martin Fournier – and surprising enough ”Under the Sun” by Vitaly Mansky, who I thought was a persona non grata in Russian festival circles!
Same positive surprise when I – in the national documentary competition – found ”My friend Boris Nemtsov” by Zosia Radkevich.
Again – 7000 submissions, it’s crazy, how do you cope with that as a festival? M2M has done it, selection is made, I can only talk from the long documentary part, which has high quality.
