Well-known director and unknown theatre-goer became the heroes of the Presidential library’s cinema club

Presidential Library hosted a cinema club meeting with the participation of the Pure Dreams International Film Festival of Independent Cinema. The attendees watched and discussed two outstanding films: “One Ticket, Please” directed by Matiss Kaza (Latvia) and “Sokurov” directed by Viktor Tikhomirov (Russia).

Presidential Library’s cinema club showed these two films for some reason. The complex artistic world, the anxiety for the future of humanity, the internal problems of their heroes intersect so much. One of them creates art, the other one lives art...

The venue of Matiss Kaza’s film is New York, Broadway, where every corner is a famous theater. The film's main character is 78-year-old Indian woman Nicky Cochrane, whom the author calls "the most passionate theater lover in the world". Things are small: ticket prices are high, and Nicky wants to go there every day. At least, she has been doing this for the past 25 years of her life and is not about to change her habit. One thing remains: to get free tickets, using a variety of original means. She is humiliated, pushed out of the line, she suffers, and finally sits in the audience chair, then, after tens of empty views, to see the “diamond”.

Graduate of Oxford and Harvard is able to distinguish genuine from fake on stage. But to build your own life does not work. The daughter of one of the international corporation’s boss today is practically a bum... Before going into the final shots in the blue waves of the ocean, she draws the line: “I consider myself a philosophical person, not spiritual. Trying to understand the essence of human nature. We, perhaps, as science asserts, are the only rational beings in the Universe, but are we worthy of the mind? .. Why is there no rise to enlightenment, but there is a decline in everything, a decline in moral principle?..”

“Sokurov” film is dedicated to director Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov, a world-famous cinema master, but at the same time a very isolated man, closed to invading his inner world. However, Viktor Tikhomirov managed to talk him over, catch precious moments when the master talks about his understanding of love, life, creativity.

There is no plot in the film. Although the attentive camera of Naum Avrumov and Pavel Medvedev is not “splendid St. Petersburg” at all. Infinite masses of closed courtyards, erased steps of the old porch, along which famous director descends and climbs, Viktor Tikhomirov’s studio - with paintings on the walls, cups of unfinished coffee, a portrait of Lenin in Soviet times in the end of the corridor...

“The city is magnificent, the city is poor” - Alexander Sokurov loves his chosen places, so the cross-section of streets in the Summer Garden area appears more than once in the film. Both the camera and the hero of the film admire this corner of the city, but the sad voiceover of Sokurov explains: “You should be born in this city, know what price it was founded on the muddy shores, how it survived under the siege; we should enjoy it, as it turns out among thousands of visiting people. I somehow fail... "From here is a traditional and such organic minor in all its films related to the city.

“It’s impossible to create something with an ideal attitude towards life”, - continues his monologue Sokurov. - Without contradictions that permeate life, there is no artistic fabric. It should be created almost according to mathematical calculations”. The ratio of the number of shadows and sun highlights, according to Sokurov, expresses the essence of the artist.  

His friends dealing with the nature of creativity help director to understand. “We value any work of art by the amount of art”, - says artist Vladimir Shinkarev. “Sokurov has art in everything”.

His films are well known far beyond the borders of Russia. The works of Bernard Shaw, Goethe, Dostoevsky - this is the level of thinking about life that the director takes to consider. "For me, at one time, it was a great gift to read a lot of literature", - continues Sokurov, "it was a whole world — it would be enough for a long time to translate cinematic ideas".

He does it so nontrivially, in his own way, that it allowed a friend of the director, film critic Oleg Kovalov, to say about Sokurov: “This is a man who cannot be stopped in search of something most important in cinema and life. We did not tell about that, but he did".

“During the times of the dominance of mass culture”, Viktor Tikhomirov is sure - it is very important to support a truly deeply authored independent film and the Pure Dreams Festival does it. Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov is considered a director for the elite, but personally I don’t think so, that is why I intended to draw the audience’s attention to this complex personality. International award-winning films of Sokurov speak for themselves. Life pushed him into the front ranks of the fighters for justice, the truth, our enduring values ​​- and he defended them, relying on humanistic and Christian principles. Self-denying, a man of integrity, disagreeable person, a great artist".