Marina Balenghien’s airy images

The heart of the Molodist Film Festival, like any serious film forum, is the competition program, which determines the leaders of contemporary filmmaking and trends. But the more serious the lineup of films the more programs are featured, including retrospective and special screenings that demonstrate a quest for a new language, forms, and trends, and featuring the best films of world cinematography. Cinema ends up reaching past its limits to related arts.

For the past several years photography exhibits have been part and parcel of Molodist’s cultural program. The 36 th international film festival featured an exhibit by the French art photographer Marina Balanghien. Her works have long been popular in Europe and Russia, but Ukraine discovered her talent only on Oct. 24, at the newly built art gallery Stop-Kadr at the Zhovten movie theater. Anyone who wants could acquaint themselves with Balanghien’s charming and sophisticated works during the week-long festival marathon.

A large part of the exhibit consist of beautiful portraits of Russian film directors and actors, each revealing character traits never before revealed to audiences: Oleg Yankovsky, Vadim Abdrashitov, Yelena Grebenshchikova, and Valerii Rubinchik, to name a few. Often these traits are conveyed through the subject’s communication with pets or objects.

This section of the exhibit has a history of its own: Marina Balanghien’s friendship with the organizers of the 15th workshop festival “Encounters with the Russian Cinema” held this year in Limoges. (France).

“This festival owes its inception and longevity to Mr. Bernard Duru, the director of the Cultural Center in Brives, who is very well versed in the field of cinematography and has a refined taste. He may have been the first in France who became enamored of Aleksandr Sokurov’s productions and the first to screen his film Rescue and Save,” says Larissa Ostrovskaya, the initiator of the project and president of the Russian Federation of Film Clubs.

The concept of the festival was to show French audiences the best examples of national cinema not confined to Russia. So Natalia Ivanova, Limoges executive producer and the head of the Khorosho Production center; Tamara Trubnikova, director of Vinnytsia’s Hlobus Press, and Larissa Ostrovskaya included Ukrainian productions in the program. Among the original retrospective pictures of Vadim Abdrashitov, Volodymyr Motyl, Petr and Valerii Todorovsky, Aleksandr Sokurov, and Ivan Dykhovychny were screened works by Roman Balaian and Kira Muratova, dating to various periods, as well as Ukrainian animated films and documentary series from Contact Studios, sired and managed for so many years by Larysa Rodnianska.

But let’s get back to the photography exhibit. In addition to portraits of prominent film directors that embellished the catalogue of the jubilee 15 th festival in Limoges, Marina Balanghien presented works from two other cycles, Butterflies and Cars. The former are executed on canvas, the second in metal. In the Butterflies series female images emerge from chimerically intertwined patterns of flowers opening their petals and dizzying mosaic pieces that embellish the butterfly wings. It is an amazing philosophy of the commonality of the female nature, spring, and the short lives of butterflies. In the Cars series, headlights of cars are animated by the faces of their passengers and perhaps their proud owners.

Still, it’s better to see an exhibit than to read about it. Drop in at the Stop- Kadr Gallery on your way to a film and get inspired by what you see. The gallery at the Zhovten cinema always has interesting exhibits.