Prize of the Jury of FIPRESCI (Jury of International Film Critics)

Nezrimoe

director: Pavel Medvedev

Russia 2007

Statement:

Taking the G8 summit in St. Petersburg in 2006 as an example, director Pavel Medvedev exposes the rituals of the contemporary business of politics in Nezrimoe: The tired choreography of the press, the brutal ballet of horrendous security machines, the rusty gestures of symbol politics. Like an ethnologist, he approaches the subject from the edges. Images that stand for themselves, without commentary or additional music and which no doubt belong to the large screen and invite the viewer to look again and again add up to this quite elegant film full of reserved, exact observation, full of sensitivity and which, in addition, tells us a lot about the present conditions of oligarchy and Putinism in Russia. A film of distances: as an alienating contrast, there is a graveyard and a stonemason, who chisels away at gravestones. This reminds us of Brecht and his lines on the transience of power: "At the Moldau the stones are moved/Three emperors are buried in Prague/The great one stays great, but the small one not small/The night has twelve hours and then already comes the break of day."

Jury FIPRESCI 2008: 

Anjelika Artyukh (Russia), Mark Peranson (Canada), Rüdiger Suchsland (Germany)