Winners of Movement film festival announced

The winners of the Movement National Film Festival of Debuts were announced yesterday in the Siberian city of Omsk. The festival, which is now in its second year, awarded the Grand Prix to 21-year-old Russian director and film student Vladimir Bek, for his feature film Skinless (Bez kozhi). An intimate depiction of a passionate, and sometimes violent, relationship between two young actors at an acting school in St Petersburg, Skinless stood out for its budget of only 36,410 rubles ($1,010) and crew of just four. Cinematographer of the film Ksenia Sereda also received an award for her work on the film.

Movement is intended to provide a platform for showcasing debut works where both young and experienced directors compete together with feature films, documentaries and even television series. Established film director Andrei Proshkin competed in the festival with his four-part series The Translator (2013), his television debut, which chronicles the heroism of a Russian teacher forced to become a translator for the Nazis. Russian actors Vitaly Khaev and Karina Andolenko walked away with both actors’ prizes for their roles in the series.

Other prize winners include Indian director Sandhya Daisy Sundaram, who won the short film competition with Love. Love. Love (2013), an 11-minute short which also won the special jury prize at the Sundance film festival in January this year. The director’s prize went to Serik Beyseuov and Sergei Dogorov for their documentary Russian Races (Russkie gonki), a picture filmed on the Kamchatka peninsula in the Russian Far East.

A special award for “outstanding contribution to Russian cinema history” went to veteran composer Eduard Artemyev who has scored music for over 200 films including Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975) and Stalker (1979).