Directors Lounge magazine

Friday, October 24

Impressions from Saint Petersburg

In front of the Rodina with the team of Tour de Film

We are back from Directors Lounge: Берлин-Петербург, our first row of screenings in this amazing town. The festival, organized by our hosts, Tour de Film and the prestigious Rodina Cinema house, was one of our most successful events so far, in terms of audience as well as in terms of dialogue and exchange. RODINA cinema house is considered to be the major venue among other cinemas specialized in world classic films, art house and contemporary experimental film works. But it was first and foremost the tremendous efforts of Marina Korotkova and Alexei Dmitriev that made our stay unforgetable and all screenings as well as the accompanying discussions cineastic highlights in the book of Directors Lounge. This far too short stay is for sure the beginning of a long relationship between Berlin and Saint Petersburg.

Enjoy some snapshots after the jump, more at our blog.

The dream team of Tour de Film, Marina Korotkova and Alexei Dmitriev

Marina, André and Klaus

Rodina, impressive plastering

the foyer of Rodina

Marina

Klaus and Alexei in the translar booth

Q & A

Masha Godovannaya, long time friend of DL

Our last night in St. Petersburg. Alexei and Marina, André and Klaus. Finally everbody was wearing hats.

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Sunday, February 17

Finale

(S.S) Sunday, the 17th, was the final evening of Director's Lounge 2008 and the atmosphere was lounge-like indeed. The Flying Vibes played a set of inspired vibraphone jazz music and later in the evening they put their talents to use by providing a live soundtrack to a silent film from Brazil, André Ricardos´ Exequias (3 min 56S, DV, 2007)

The Directors Lounge crew made a 'greatest hits' set of films from the past 10 days and it was impressive to look back at the variety of films that were shown: comedy, documentary, text based pieces, textured film, poetic film...from all over the world.

Brendan Howell and Lars Kuenstler performed a live mixed DJ/VJ set using imagery from East German communist gymnastics training videos.The footage was really beautiful and Lars overlaid the found footage with different colors and textures, speeding things up or slowing things down in time to Brendan's wild synthesized beats.

One award was given to the Portuguese filmmaker Miguel Machado for The Long Overtone (18min 25s, 2006) and surely if their was an unofficial soundtrack to the Director's Lounge 2008 it was the ambling guitar solo from this film. For my part, I would have given the best film award to the Spanish filmmaker Xavi Sala for his entry La Parabólica (2007, 12 min). I will never look at satellites and umbrellas the same way again.

It has been a pleasure writing about these beautiful and off-kilter films and I hope to do it again next year. In the meantime, if any of you readers would like to contact me about what I have written for the Director's Lounge, my email is foodandfootage@gmail.com

Thanks for reading!

Sabrina Small

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