MIFF Free Thought Documentary Programme
I asked Georgy Molodtsov, a young filmmaker, who I met at the DoxPro in St. Petersburg, and who is working for the Documentary section at MIFF – to give some background on the festival’s documentary development. Here are clips from his text:
“Free thought” was created by Sergey Miroshnichenko (director of the excellent 7UP Russian version project called “Born in the USSR” (photo)) together with producer, programmer and promoter Grigory Libergal in 2006. Their idea (which was reflected in their catalogue foreword from that year) was that modern documentaries might be compared with serious literature and philosophical publications. But the author should not lose his thoughts and ideas, carried away by the freedom of form.
For the selection: “The aim of our noncompetitive program is to present a selection of outstanding documentaries from the last year – winners of prestigious film festivals as long as films with good box-office revenue.” Overloaded halls in all editions on almost every screening gave us a chance to develop our program.
Last year public the TV-Channel “Kultura” (Rossia-K) invited the two to make a weekly talk-show “Watch and Discuss” with a screening of best feature documentaries, mostly those which were presented in “Free thought” program. Every Saturday evening 4 experts, group of young film critics, bloggers and filmmakers and prominent Russian film director Vladimir Khotinenko watch and discuss full-length creative documentaries. Last season we`ve screened only 18 films, but we hope that from the next season there will be more. At the moment that is the only strand on Russian terrestrial TV dedicated to creative documentaries and, as we see from the ratings, it has its regular and wide audience.
Our 2011 competition program (see above) is based on the idea of audience orientation. We wanted to show the selection of the films, which are aimed on audience and might have good box-office in their countries or around the world.
http://www.moscowfilmfestival.ru/eng/
Still: Sergey Miroshnichenko: Born in the USSR. From dutchdocaward.nl.