The Rome Film Festival, upon recommendation of the Director Marco Müller, will award the Marc’Aurelio of the Future to Aleksey Fedorchenko, director of First on the Moon and Ovsyanki /Silent Souls (both award winners at the Venice International Film Festival) andCelestial Wives of the Meadow Mari (in Competition at the Rome Film Festival in 2012), producer of over twenty films, screenwriter and author. After the awards ceremony, the Russian filmmaker will present the world premiere of his latest film, Angels of Revolution (Angely revolutsii),in the “Cinema d’Oggi” (Cinema Today) section.
Fedorchenko’s new film, set in the Soviet Union, is the story of the meeting and clash between different cultures in the 1930s under Stalin, seen through the eyes of fivr avant-garde artists, sent to the outer regions for agit-proppurposes. The film is an adaptation of the short stories by Denis Osokin, winner of the Russian “Debut Prize” literary award for young writers, author of the novel that inspired Ovsyanki and screenwriter for Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari. The cast of Angels of Revolution features, among others, Darya Ekamasova (the star of Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari, also in Zhila byla odna baba/Once Upon a Time There Lived a Simple Woman by Andrei Smirnov, and Svobodnoe Plavanie/Free Floating by Boris Khlebnikov, screened at the Venice International Film Festival in the Orizzonti section), Konstantin Balakirev (Stilyagi/Hipsters by Valery Todorovsky, screened at the Toronto Film Festival), Aleksey Solonchyov (Un lac by Philippe Grandrieux, Special Mention at the Venice International Film Festival).
“Aleksey Fedorchenko is an absolutely original figure in the landscape of Russian production of the Third Millenium”, explains Artistic Director Marco Müller, “First of all, because in every transition from one film to the next he has reinvented both style and genre. In his filmography, he contradicts the documentary with the mockumentary, reconceives the landscape-driven dramatic film as a pantheistic comedy (in this sense Celestial Wives of the Meadow Mari appears as a response to Ovsyanki – Silent Souls).
Starting with his first extraordinary feature film (the mockumentary First on the Moon), Fedorchenko has demolished conventional narrative structure. In the ‘narrative’ feature films that followed, he has gone much farther than simply proposing a highly personal version of lyrical-painterly cinema: by emphasizing the figurative aspects he has relegated the text and its logical structures to second place, using images to evoke analogies, allegories, metaphors and non-realistic (and only in some cases surrealistic) distortions. The viewer is forced to contend with a universe of meanings and feelings that he must first be able to perceive, before even trying to understand.
The risk of a schematic portrayal of literary-inspired subjects, the rigidity of the fable are exploded by the power of the images – which are always concrete, never abstract, even when his films consist in extreme, expanded or compressed storylines, constantly illuminated by flashes of poetry.
Even in his most recent Angels of Revolution, the visionary quality of the images is not an end unto itself. It serves to extend his thought about the relationship between man and nature, to confront the fascination of traditional culture, be it real or made-up, against the violence of History (of power). And once again Fedorchenko proves to be one of the few contemporary filmmakers able to create renewed perspectives, time after time.”