Message to Man Saint-Petersburg
It is festival time – September, October and November – all over the world and it is a good time for the documentary genre. Gianfranco Rosi won the main award in Venice with his ”Sacro Gra” in competition with feature films, from a jury headed by Bernardo Bertolucci, who said he wanted to be surprised and found Rosi’s film to live up to that criteria with its poetry and characters… words to that effect.
In Saint-Petersburg there is also good chances for surprising experiences when you look into the big programme of Message to Man presented from September 21-28, alone in the competitive programme there is 103 films from 37 countries… should be noticed that the festival shows long and short documentaries, short fiction films, short animation films, experimental films – and have well edited special screenings and programmes.
Difficult to highlight titles from the many sections, but ”The Act of Killing” (director Joshua Oppenheimer’s cut) is there, Chilean ”The Last Station” by Cristian Soto and Catalina Vergara competes as does ”Matthews Laws” by Marc Schmidt and ”Cantos” by Charlie Petersmann.
An intelligent side programme called ”Close. Family Films” include Alan Berliner’s classic ”Nobody’s Business”, Pawel Lozinski’s ”Father and Son”, Polley’s ”Stories We Tell” and ”Svyato” by Victor Kossakovsky – among others.
Under another caption – less descriptive, entitled ”Gala Premieres” – you find titles like ”First Cousin Once Removed” (Alan Berliner), ”La Maison de le Radio” (Nicolas Philibert) (photo), ”My Afghanistan-Life in the Forbidden Zone” (Nagieb Khaja) and ”Life With Jester” (Helena Trestikova), not to forget ”L’Image Manquante” (Rithy Panh).
A feast it will be!
http://message2man.com/eng/news/id/599/
