The International competition of the 10th IDFF Flahertiana (October 14 - 20) collected 20 titles from all over the world, including award-winning films such as the last year’s winner of IDFA Amsterdam, Last Train Home (Lixin Fan), or Chemo by Pawel Lozinski, that won the Best Director Award at the 2010 One World Festival in Prague.
For more information about the festival and its program, please visit www.flahertiana.ru.
Films in the selected into the international competition:
1. “21 Below”, Samantha Buck, USA, 91 min., 2009
2. “A Normal Life. Chronicle of a Sumo Wrestler”, Jill Coulon, France, Japan, 83min., 2009
3. “Agrarian Utopia”, Uruphong Raksasad, Thailand, the Netherlands, 120 мин, 2009
4. “Alamar”, Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio, Mexico, 74 min., 2009
5. “Albert's Winter”, Andreas Koefoed, Denmark, 30 min., 2009
6. “Alda”, Viera Cakanyova (Viera Čákanyová), Чехия, 52 мин, 2009
7. “At the Edge of Russia”, Michał Marczak, Poland, 72 min., 2010
8. “Chemo”, Pawel Lozinski, Poland, 58 min., 2009
9. “Freetime Machos”, Mika Ronkainen, Finland, Germany, 86 мин, 2009
10. “From Ramstein with Love”, Irena Langemann, Germany, 89 min.., 2010
11. “Imagining New York”, Eros Achiardi, Barbara Maffeo, Italy, 14 min., 2010
12. “Kinshasa Symphony”, Claus Wischmann, Martin Baer, Germany, 94 min., 2010
13. “Last Train Home”, Lixin Fan, Canada, 87 min., 2009
14. “Lonely Pack”, Justin Peach, Lisa Engelbach, Germany, 48 min., 2009
15. “Mugabe and White African”, Andy Thompson, Lucy Bailey, UK, 90 min., 2010
16. “North From Calabria”, Marcin Sauter, Poland, 67 min., 2009
17. “The Miscreants of Talliwood”, George Gittoes, Australia, 92 мин., 2009
18. “The Painful Points”, Ivan I. Tverdovskiy, Russia, 27 min., 2010
19. “The Tightrope”, Nuria Ibanez, Mexico, 85 min., 2009
20. “Village Without Women”, Srdjan Sarenac, Croatia, 52 min., 2010
Alda | Viera Čakányová
Czech Republic | 2009 | 52 min.
The screenplay for this film is based on writings of a person suffering from Alzheimer’s type of dementia. The story of Mrs. O. is told through a combination of documentary film footage and her own videos from a handy digital camera, where she records mini instructions for different daily activities, memories, thoughts and commentaries on various events, trying to prevent forgetting them later in the future. She comments the past and the presence briefly, with humour and irony, trying naively to print herself into the medium of film for further reference in the memory-less future. Through the individual story of a gradual memory loss the film represents a metaphor of memory loss of the whole society which is trying to forget past events that determined its current status quo.
