VITALIJ KANEVSKIJ

The constancy of innocence

From the outermost reaches of the Soviet Far East, the Torino Film Festival presents the vibrant cinema of Vitali Kanevsky, the revelation of the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, which awarded him the Golden Camera for his film Zamri, umri, voskresni! The award marked the sudden, international fame of a filmmaker whose dense and ironic style was able to penetrate the harshest manifestations of reality thanks to the wealth of experiences and emotions he accumulated during his adolescent struggles with hunger, freezing temperatures and the humblest of jobs in the city-prison, Soutchan.
A stubborn fight to affirm the elemental forces of life is the leitmotif of the director's short filmography, which is structured along freely interconnected moments. The objective of the Torino Film Festival's tribute is to highlight this leitmotif, to go beyond the label of glasnost cinema - thanks to its undeniable value in revealing hidden aspects of the Soviet regime - and to underscore a type of realism that refutes all forms of intelligentsia and whose autobiographical slant never descends into fiction or self-referentialism and thus becomes a "memory trance."
The Festival presents all the films and documentaries directed by Kanevsky, who will be in Torino to share his experiences.