Courtesy of the artist, Vitamin Creative Space, and Sprüth Magers
The Moscow International Festival (MIEFF), founded in 2016, introduces a wide audience to experimental cinema in all its diversity. This year, the screenings will be united by the common theme One Thousand and One Ways to Find Home—the audience will be presented with a collection of anomalies, audiovisual research, and innovative techniques from different cultures of working with video and moving images. International and national competitions and special curatorial programs will be presented from August 11th to 17th at Moscow venues.
At the opening of the festival, which will take place on August 11th at the summer cinema Garage Screen, films with reflections on urban landscapes will be presented. Among them: a collage by Lebanese artist Hayk Ayvazyan, dedicated to street lighting as a tool of control, and a film by the director and representative of the indigenous Kumeyaay and Luiseño people Fox Maxy on strategies for knowing and caring for the land.
The MIEFF will also showcase the first ever program “Crossroads”—a platform for cultural exchange and dialogue between different participants of the artistic scene. The guests of this year’s “Crossroads” will be the curators of Image Forum, the largest Japanese festival of experimental cinema. Its director, Koyo Yamashita, has collected the most interesting works of directors and artists from Japan in recent years for MIEFF. At the first screening, viewers will be offered six films, including a collage assembled by Keitaro Oshima from rejected fragments of film and photographs, and an “uneasy journey” edited by Jeroen Van der Stock. The second screening will feature, among other works, a fantasy film by Shun Ikezoe, based on the director's memories of his stepmother, and Masa Kudo's exquisite animation experiment in working with rhythm and time in the space of a small coffee shop.
On August 16th, at the closing of the festival, the winners of the competition programs will be announced, and there will be the Russian premiere of a film by Chinese multimedia artist Cao Fei Nova—a retrofuturistic sci-fi piece about the history of cybernetics in China in the context of Soviet-Chinese relations.
Read more about the festival on the website.
