First festival of Russian films ended in Tbilisi

The organizers of the First Russian Film Festival, which ended in Tbilisi on November 8, said that the results surpassed all their expectations.

The "Caucasian Knot" has reported that the programme of the festival included "Anna Karenina" by Sergey Solovyov, "Playing the Victim" by Kirill Serebrennikov, "Buntings" by Alexei Fedorchenko, "One War" by Vera Glagoleva, "The Return" by Andrei Zvyagintsev, "Morphine" by Alexei Balabanov, "Miracle" by Alexander Proshkin and ten best Russian animated films of recent years.

"We have a desire to make the festival regular," Vyacheslav Shmyrov, programme director of the Russian Film Festival in Tbilisi, said at the final press conference.

"It was a huge splash of emotions. Special human aura permeated the entire festival and our meetings both related to cinema and beyond," the "News-Georgia" quotes Sergey Selyanov, a film director, screenwriter and head of the STV Film Company, as saying.

Vyacheslav Yurevich, another programme director of the festival, explained that the aim of the event was to start a dialogue between the creative intelligentsia of both countries and expressed hope that next year a similar festival of Georgian films will be held in Moscow, the "Georgia Online" writes.

Meanwhile, not everyone takes such initiatives with great enthusiasm.

"I think it unacceptable to pretend that nothing had happened in the Georgian-Russian relations; and we love each other as in Soviet times," Lasha Bakradze, Georgian literary critic and historian, said in his turn.

"Those areas now occupied by Russia, are not Russia's main goal. It needs all of Georgia; and in many ways they will try to pursue their policy. In this sense, Russia is often using its culture," The BBC-Russia quotes Mr Bakradze.

The founders of the festival were Giya Bazgadze and Konstantin Lusignian-Rizhinashvili; the organizers were the International Fund for Arts and Intercultural Dialogue (Tbilisi) and the Production Centre "Kinoprocess" (Moscow) with support by the Interstate Fund for Humanitarian Cooperation of the CIS member-countries.