Tribute to Sergei Parajanov
Sergei Parajanov was born on January 9th, 1924 in Tbilisi, Georgia. He studied railway engineering, and later studied song and violin at the Tbilisi Conservatory of Music, before attending the Moscow Film School from 1946 to 1951. His diploma film, Moldavian Fairy Tale (1951) has been lost. He made several documentary films during the 1950s which are in the Kiev archive, and then made a series of feature films at Dovzhenko Studios: The First Lad, Ukrainian Rhapsody, and The Flower on the Stone. Then in 1964 Paradjanov’s ninth film, Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors, created a furor by revolting against the Social Realist principles of Soviet cinema. The film had a very limited release in the Soviet Union, though it received awards at international film festivals. His next films were plagued by production interruptions and other difficulties. He began shooting a film called Sayat Nova in Armenia but the director’s cut was confiscated; Paradjanov eliminated 20 minutes from his original film in order to rescue the project, and released the re-edited remainder under the title of The Color of Pomegranates (1969). Widely acclaimed as a masterwork of modern cinema, The Color of Pomegranates yet remains a fragment of its creator’s original vision: “My masterpiece no longer exists,” Paradjanov said. Paradjanov’s career was forcibly halted at this point. He was arrested in Kiev in 1973 and sentenced on April 25, 1974 to five years in a prison camp. The charges against him were: “business with art objects”, “leaning towards homosexuality”, “incitement to suicide,” and “black-marketing.” Released in 1978 following protests by friends and artists world-wide (between these Andrei Tarkovsky, Tonino Guerra, Federico Fellini, Giulietta Masina, Michelangelo Antonioni), he was allowed to return home to Tbilisi, but not allowed to make films. In 1982, he was again arrested and detained by the KGB. After 15 years of being blacklisted, Paradjanov was finally allowed to make several films in Tbilisi. He had just begun making an autobiographical film, Confessions, in 1989 when he fell ill with lung cancer. He died on July 20, 1990, in Yerevan, where he was buried.

The Color of the Pomegranate
(Armenia, 1969, 88’)
One of the greatest masterpieces of the 20th century, Sergei Parajanov’s “Color of the Pomegranate”, a biography of the Armenian troubadour Sayat Nova (King of Song) reveals the poet’s life more through his poetry than a conventional narration of important events in Sayat Nova’s life. We see the poet grow up, fall in love, enter a monastery and die, but these incidents are depicted in the context of what are images from Sergei Parajanov’s imagination and Sayat Nova’s poems, poems that are seen and rarely heard. Sofiko Chiaureli plays 6 roles, both male and female, and Sergei Parajanov writes, directs, edits, choreographs, works on costumes, design and decor and virtually every aspect of this revolutionary work void of any dialog or camera movement.

Shadows of forgotten ancestors
(USSR, 1964, 92’)
In a Carpathian village, Ivan falls in love with Marichka, the daughter of his father’s killer. When tragedy befalls her, his grief lasts months; finally he rejoins the colorful life around him, marrying Palagna. She wants children but his mind stays on his lost love. To recapture his attention, Palagna tries sorcery, and in the process comes under the spell of the sorcerer, publicly humiliating Ivan, who then fights the sorcerer. The lively rhythms of village life, the work and the holidays, the pageant and revelry of weddings and funerals, the change of seasons, and nature’s beauty give proportion to Ivan’s tragedy.

The legend of Suram fortress
(USSR, 1984, 83’)
Based on an ancient legend, this dazzling film by visionary director Sergei Paradjanov is a surreal ode to Georgian warriors throughout the ages who died for their country. Repeated efforts by the Georgian people to construct a defensive stronghold continually fail. The building collapses until a fortune teller remembers an old prophecy that the son of her erstwhile lover must be bricked up alive in order for the fortress to stand. The young man is faced with the prospect of sacrificing himself to save his country.

by Gao Xingjian, Alain Melka, Jean-Louis Darmyn, in conjunction with Triangle Méditerranée, Marseille

Synopsis
A man in a car sees himself walking all alone in a desert city. The shops are closed, the house are abandoned and the doors are locked. He plunges into his memories and imagination, entering into a pure state of creativity. Soon, he conjures images of a fragile yet unfinished life and death.It unravels scenes of human relations – man and woman, an individual and the mass – as well as childhood nostalgia and war memories…A solitary artist who is always in quest of emptiness and an indefinite spaces, thus leads one into an immeasurably subtle and poetic film.

Estratto da “La silhouette o l’ombra”
Gao Xingjian, 17 marzo 2007, Parigi
Translated by Carmela Menzella
Considering the existing film categories, Silhouette/Shadow is impossible to classify.  It is not fiction, neither documentary nor biography. It could be read as a cinematic poem or perhaps a modern fable. This work cannot find its way easily into commercial distribution and has been rejected by film festivals, yet it is right the film I intended to make. I had wanted to make a film for so long, since the early 80’s when I was still in China, during the renaissance in theatre and filmmaking at the end of the anti-culture “Cultural Revolution”.
Film is primarily image. Almost all popular films today use their visual language to tell a story. What I wanted to do, indeed, was to make an art film that would possess greater freedom in its expression by fully exploiting the potential of each of the three components technologically available in film.
With reference to the picture, if it no longer tells a story and if every scene, just like paintings and photographs, fully manifest the attraction of plastic art and the meaning of photography, then every scene could be savoured and there would be no need or rush to change scenes just for the sake of representing events. In this way, each picture, each scene are relatively independent, and can structure their own meaning without the help of either sounds or language. A soundless screen then could be even more interesting. We could succeed in watching the film with the eye of the artist, if we made full use of methods of plastic art.
…When a film can encompass within itself literature, drama, dance, painting, photography and music, it becomes total art.

From its begining, Festival REC has believed that a festival borned in XXI cent has to make an aproach to audiovisual disciplines from a contemporary and transversal perspective by promoting debates, offering new windows for new authors, a spot to new languages and research, fomenting new ways of watching, and works for breaking the usual monologue between the screen and the audience. This is why REC has grown with interactive workshops, dialogues with creators, and competitions for the nowadays works.
During ten years, our programs has been growing up in a progressive evolution, with non competitive sections as the show “Classics nowadays”, new interpretation of avant-garde classics, going deeply into our duty of media literacy. In order to approach the movies to the general public, we start to use a world heritage spaces on open air, where never before was a film screenings, another step in media literacy and mix city&cinema. But the competition shines with our two main programmes: Opera Prima (First Feature Film International Competition), where new directors from worlwide show their Film Debut, and Live Cinema (Audiovisual Narrative Real Time Shows International Competition), where research and exploration are shown to the audience.
This is how REC Festival arrives to its 10^th edition with a clear manifestation: speaking about the future from the works of the present.

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