Kira Muratova Memorial Evening in Berlin 9 July 2024

The first movie is Kira Muratova's little-known picture "The Doll" (32 min, Ukraine). The doll is a bundle of fake money. Thehero of the movie says: "I hate my ex-wife so much that I will pretend as if I ennobled her, but in reality I will play a trick on her."

The second film is "Kira" ( 48 min) by director Vladimir Nepevny, who will come from Israel to present his picture. The film stars: directors Andrzej Wajda, Alexei German, Alexander Sokurov, Ali Khamraev, actresses Renata Litvinova, Zinaida Sharko, screenwriter Natalia Ryazantseva.

Alexander Smoliansky will talk to Vladimir Nepevny about his meetings with Kira Muratova and his work on his other films - about Sergei Kurekhin, Alexander Galich, Arthur Lurie, Viktor Sosnor, Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson, Alexander Volodin and Ilya Ilf.

Here is what film critic Andrei Plakhov wrote in his obituaryforKira Muratova:
Although she had no Oscars or Palm Springs, and the most significant in her collection of awards was the Silver Bear special prize at the Berlin Festival for her film "Asthenic Syndrome," her place is next to Bergman, Godard, Antonioni. Unlike them, Muratova lived her entire life away from the capitals - in her beloved Odessa with its marginal film industry. There she built a unique artistic world and invented an equally special cinematic language.

From the very beginning Muratova did not fit in anywhere: neither in VGIK, nor in the Odessa Film Studio, nor in the Western festival crowd, which at one time noisily extolled her. Even the director's nationality was not Russian, Ukrainian or Soviet, but Romanian. Inherited from his mother, it caused a lot of trouble at the time. In Muratov's conception, the beauty of a person, as of all things, is determined by his naturalness, and not at all by cultural or moral qualifications. The more primitive a specimen of the human species, the more involuntarily its self-valuable essence manifests itself.