"And the king is naked" - this famous phrase was immediately remembered to me after I read the list of winners of the Grand Prix of the Russian film festival "Kinotaur" for the past ten years (2008-2018):
2008: "Shultes", directed by Bakur Bakuradze;
2009: "Volchok", directed by Vasily Sigarev;
2010: "Truce", directed by Svetlana Proskurina;
2011: "Indifference", directed by Oleg Flangolts;
2012: "I will be there for you", directed by Pavel Ruminov;
2013: "The Geographer drank the globe", directed by Alexander Veledinsky;
2014: "Test", dir; directed by Alexander Kott;
2015: "About Love", directed by Anna Melikyan;
2016: "Good boy", directed by Oksana Karas;
2017: "Arrhythmia", directed by Boris Khlebnikov;
2018: "Heart of the World", directed by Natalia Meshchaninova.
In my opinion, the list is very sad, as there is not a single truly outstanding work among the Grand Prix winners of the largest Russian film festival in the last ten years.
Who (except for some advanced film historians and film critics) will remember today's anti-viewer art house opuses “Shultes”, “Volchok”, “Truce”, “Indifference”, “I'll be there for you”, “Test” (all of these films, by the way, were the outsiders in distribution)?
In my opinion, can there be any true achievements of the film art in (in my opinion) the mediocre movies "About Love", The Geographer drank the globe", "Good Boy", "Arrhythmia", and "The Heart of the World"?
And now a considerable number of Russian film critics, relentlessly overpowering, raises on a shield even more art-house-pretentitious "Acid" (2018), posing it almost as a new word in the art of film and social criticism.
Sadly, all this...
Alexander Fedorov, 2018
P.S. In 2019, Boris Akopov's film "The Bull", which tells the story of bandits of the 1990s, won the Grand Prix of “Kinotaur”. Russian viewers have long been fed up with gangster showdowns: the film is expected to fall in cinema-theaters...
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