A three-minute long insight into the life of completely unusual people – a group of pacifists forced into hiding in the cellar of a ruinous house to escape a war tribunal. The difficulties of war are manly endured by the film’s characters. This film, like most of Yufit’s works, shows his love of 1920’s avant garde cinema, which was considered the highest pinnacle in cinematography. The director believes the art of moving pictures was more heartfelt before sound and colour. “The development of technologies is not a particularly positive thing for human existence,” says Yufit. —Arsenals Film Festival
Evgenii Iufit (Yevgeny Yufit) was born in 1961 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In the early 1980s he began working as a painter and art photographer. In 1985 he set up the first independent film studio in Russia, MZHALALA FILM, which brought together artists, writers, directors and others sympathetic to radical aesthetic experimentation.
At this studio Iufit made a number of films which have been shown at the world’s major film festivals including Montreal, Locarno, Toronto, Rotterdam, and Moscow. His film, Daddy, Frost is Dead, was awarded the Grand Prix at the Rimini Film Festival in Italy. Iufit’s paintings and photographs have been shown in major exhibitions of contemporary Russian art since 1985, at the State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunstahalle, Dusseldorf; Kunstverein, Hanover, and The Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City. Works by Iufit are to be found in museums, galleries, and private collections both… read more