Meeting with director Vitaly Mansky in Berlin 4 February 2024

Another meeting in the cycle of A. Smolyansky's series "Travelling as self-discovery".

Our guests are film director Vitaly Mansky, winner of more than 100 prizes at international film festivals and the Nika award, president of the Artdokfest festival.

Screening of the latest film by V. Mansky and Evgeny Titarenko "Eastern Front" (Latvia, Ukraine, Czech Republic, USA, 98 min, 2023), which premiered at Berlinale 2023.

Here is what Meduza wrote after the premiere of the film at Berlinale:

This film has two authors. Vitaly Mansky is a venerable documentary filmmaker, winner and participant of festivals, head of Artdocfest, born in Lviv, who lived in Moscow for many years and moved to Riga in recent years. And Yevgeny Titarenko, call sign Rezhik (i.e. director), is an Odessa-born film producer and teacher who went to the front in 2014 and is making films there, but also works as part of the medical brigade of the volunteer battalion "Hospitallers". Mansky and his co-operator Ivan Fomichenko filmed in western Ukraine, in a village where Titarenko's relatives and his comrades-in-arms were evacuated. The fighters come there for a few days for a short respite, to be with the nine-month-old baby of one of them. Titarenko filmed directly during the fighting, in the heat of the battle. Shocking from the first to the last frame, the contrast between the two realities is the thread of the Eastern Front's intensity. Mansky and Titarenko's film is strong and yet innovative: it erases the seemingly inevitable distance between the director (at least one of them) and the material. This war is probably the most documented war in history, and cinematography has become an integral feature of it. It is this phenomenon that Eastern Front explores and exploits, in which Rézik is both the film's creator and its central character.

After the film we will talk about documentary cinema and censorship and propaganda in cinema, about the life of the artist in exile, about Ukraine and Russia and many other things that are of concern to everyone nowadays.

The audience will enjoy a discussion and dialogue over a glass of wine.