Russians, 8/23.

"The battle between good and evil gets quite a workout in the 2007 Russian Resurrection Film Festival, the annual showcase of contemporary Russian cinema," writes Rosalie Higson in the Australian. Scroll down to the bottom of the article or sideways along the rather nifty site for the fest for dates; it's wandering all over the continent, as festivals tend to do down there. Via Movie City News.

"Now in its sixth year, the Pusto festival is being held this week at Dom Kommuny, a Constructivist student dormitory built in 1929 on Ulitsa Ordzhonikidze," reports Marina Kamenev for the Moscow Times. "The films are projected onto an outside wall of the building. The festival showcases the work of both Russian and international artists, including such Pusto veterans as director Yakov Kazhdan, who has participated in the festival from the start." Today through Saturday. Also: Alastair Gee on Andrei Konchalovsky's Gloss and Vladislav Lipovich talks with screenwriter Alexander Mindadze about the directorial debut he's taking to Venice: "Life in today's Russia is life in the wake of a major shock, he said, and exploring this 'aftershock existence' is one of the goals of Detachment."

Ignatius Vishnevetsky is "currently in my father's home town, Rostov-on-the-Don, a hilly city on built along the banks of a river in the South of Russia." He's been catching some TV - after all, some of it's quite good - and most recently, The Foundling, a film that's "childish in the most beautiful sense of the word."

For SF360, Dennis Harvey checks in on From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema, at the Pacific Film Archive through the end of the month: "Some of these movies have kitschily dated aspects, occasionally because they resemble similar, familiar Hollywood flick-reflected through a cultural funhouse mirror. Many remain fascinating and delightful because they are just so profoundly different from the vast majority of such adventures made anywhere else, certainly in the West."

Posted by dwhudson at August 23, 2007 2:07 PM