Premiere:
Films by Andrej Končalovskij and Aleksej Fedorčenko
April 30 and May 1, 2015
While Andrej Zvjagincev’s Academy-Award-nominated Leviathan has thankfully been released in Austria, two other outstanding Russian films from 2014 will not be shown commercially in this country: Andrej Končalovskij's The Postman's White Nights and Aleksej Fedorčenko's Angels of Revolution. In order for them to be seen in Austria, the Crossing Europe Film Festival and the Film Museum have jointly organized premiere screenings in Linz and Vienna. Together, these major works reveal crucial facets of a country which stands at the center of media attention today. They examine the relationship between past and present in a nation that is often viewed as a field of illimitable forces, expansive in both geographical and political terms.
Končalovskij, having returned to Russia in the early 1990s after a decade in Hollywood, has finally reattached himself to the wondrous naturalism of his early masterpieces such as Asya’s Happiness (1966). In The Postman's White Nights, he draws the semi-documentary portrait of a (speedboat) postman at the remote Kenozero Lake – an area that literally has lost the engine of progress. Fedorčenko's Angels of Revolution heads even further north: in 1934, the Soviet regime sent a group of avant-garde artists to the land of the indigenous Khanty people in order to convince them of the utopian potential of the revolution. This bizarre and ultimately bloody process is described in Angels of Revolution in stylized, humorous and deeply disturbing setpieces.
The premieres are presented in collaboration with the Crossing Europe Film Festival.