Russian Documentary Survey
Extensive and valuable information was sent to me by Russian Georgy Molodtsov, energetic filmmaker and promoter of documentaries from his country – together with Sergei Kachkin, Alisa Stolyarova and Vlad Ketkovich, contact persons for Moscow Business Square, Documentary Film Center and the Russian Documentary Guild.
43 pages, editor-in-chief Konstantin Nafikov, captions: Festivals, Cinemas, Producers, Distributors, Sales Agents, tv channels.
There is a detailed description of how to get support from the Ministry of Culture through obtaining a status of ”National Film”, there is a statistic of how many admissions foreign films have made in Russian cinemas with ”Citizen Four” (Laura Poitras) and ”Amy” (Asif Kapadia) in the top with 33.000 and 24.000. A list of production companies, of international film festivals, tv channels, and first and foremost the films with credits, links to trailers, information on where to watch the full films – many of the are right now at IDFA’s Docs for Sale and at East Silver run by IDF in Prague. Director names – Alina Rudnitskaya, Tatiana Soboleva, Denis Klebeev (photo from his succesful ”Strange Particles”), Viktor Kossakovsky, Ivan Tverdovsky, Vitaly Mansky, Sergei Miroshnichenko… to mention a few.
At this very moment where the IDFA Forum is running and where projects are presented that have budgets around 250.000€ or more, it is interesting to read the budgets of the Russian documentaries, very few of them exceed 100.000€.
Thanks for doing this big work, I say as one who is always interested in what happens in the big country – and thanks for including the controversial films as well, which are ”only” shown outside Russia.
