DOK Leipzig: Caucasian Lessons
The upcoming festival in Leipzig (October 18-24) has an interesting retrospective with films from the conflict zone in Caucasia. Here is the site introduction text:
“Eight programmes with some twenty films will give you sufficient opportunity to deal with a transit and conflict zone between Europe and Asia, between the old world order and a new region. Political stories from Georgia, the clash of traditional and post-modern lifestyles in Armenia, archaic culture and crazy poets from Azerbaijan. The focus is also on the battle in the media around the events in Southern Ossetia, the search for terrorists in Dagestan as well as the war-torn countryside in Nagorno-Karabakh, where the effects of the conflict are still felt. And finally: Figures of loss – the disintegration is omnipresent.”
A couple of the films have been reviewed or noted here: Georgian Salome Jashi’s ‘The Leader is always Right‘ , Nino Kartidze’s propaganda piece ‘Something about Georgia‘ , ‘The Last Tightrope Dancer‘ by Inna Sahakyan and ‘A Story about People in War and Peace‘ by Vardan Hovhannisyan – the two latter from Armenia. Not written about, but seen at Baltic Sea Forum is the shocking film by Andrei Nekrasov, ‘Russian Lessons‘ (PHOTO), that I would need to watch again before writing about a film that is more controversial than the rest of the programme. Nekrasov, Russian, has been threatened to death for this film, in Russia, whereas he is said to be a hero in Georgia in his description of the recent war.
