In this strange year… Just kidding. This is not another text on our situation. Here are, simply, four great short documentaries from the East, both the closer (Russia) and the Far one (Japan and China). Although they are set in cultures very different from ours, or in a culture that we want to believe is very different from the Western but is actually much more similar than we’d admit, they talk about issues that are common to everyone: pregnancy, childhood, education, propaganda, personal values, generation gap, and social circumstances and how they shape us and direct our life paths.
The films are not exactly connected between themselves; instead, we tried to give you an experience that is more intuitive than thematic. This is why we start with Katelyn Rebelo and Kira Dane’s IDFA Best Short Film winner Mizuko, an experimental combination of animation and photographs, and then we move to a play of shadows and light in socially relevant and beautifully atmospheric Russian film Shadows of Your Childhood by Mikhail Gorobchuk. After this, we stay in Russia and see how young boys are indoctrinated and built into good soldiers in the militarized society with the student film Golden Buttons, where director Alex Evstigneev uses a device basically invented by a Slovenian filmmaker – Karpo Godina’s staged photographs. Finally, Tenzin Sedon’s epic Kora: A Circle of Life, winner of Best Canadian Short Documentary at Hot Docs, which represents the most standard storytelling in a story of a Tibetan family that is both touching and sobering.
While our original idea with the East of Eden programme was to show audiences and filmmakers from the region of former Yugoslavia how good films can be made in similar production circumstances and cultural background to ours, we also believe that some themes are universal and that directing approaches can follow them regardless of geography, history and economics. This selection aims to do just that, and above all, provide you with some much-needed inspiration and real emotions.
Vladan Petković