Open World Leadership Center (Washington, DC) Posted on August 12, 2008
By OWLC
From left: Russian documentarians Olga Stefanova, Igor Morozov, and Anastasia Tarasova, film curator Vasiliy Gusak, and facilitator Vladimir Andreyev visit New York City in July 2008.
Counterclockwise from left: Russian filmmakers Olga Stefanova, Anastasia Tarasova, and Igor Morozov with a poster announcing the June 28 screening of their selected works in Hamilton, NY.
Life in a trio of Urals-region villages with the unlikely names of Paris, Berlin, and Leipzig … A remote community by Lake Baikal coping with the end of a railway construction boom … Beslan two years after the 2004 terrorist school siege. These are the themes of three compelling documentary shorts that helped earn filmmakers Olga Stefanova, Anastasia Tarasova, and Igor Morozov selection as participants in Open World’s 2008 Russian Cultural Leaders Program. Open World brought the three documentarians and St. Petersburg film curator Vasily Gusak to New York in June to take part in the legendary Robert Flaherty Film Seminar and to experience and contribute to New York City’s film scene.
At the Flaherty Seminar, held this year at Colgate College in Hamilton, the Open World delegates attended film screenings and participated in the lively discussions that followed each. The Russians also talked shop with Sundance Film Festival representatives and presented a free public showing of their own featured works. Delegate Olga Stefanova, a journalist by training, presented “Beslan. The Right to Live,” a stark look at the handling and aftermath of the 2004 school attack. Filmmaker Anastasia Tarasova, who like Stefanova has a background in journalism, screened her “Children of the Great Lake,” which depicts hard times in a provincial town by Lake Baikal and the Baikal-Amur railway line. Veteran film editor Igor Morozov, who only recently took up film directing, showed “Phantom of Europe,” which explores the lighter side of daily life in a corner of the Urals known to locals as “Little Europe.”
In New York City, the filmmakers gave a second well-received screening of their works at Anthology Film Archives, which they and fellow delegate Vasily Gusak followed up with a dynamic Q-and-A session with audience members. Another Big Apple highlight was meeting with Tribeca Film Festival organizers.
New York City–based CEC ArtsLink coordinated the filmmakers’ U.S. visit as part of its ongoing partnership with Open World on the Cultural Leaders Program.
The Russian delegates’ featured films are available for online viewing through the links below:
