Eleventh Kazan Muslim Film Festival concludes

The 11th Kazan Muslim Film Festival concludes. Tonight, the official closing ceremony will take place at Kamal Theatre, winners will be pronounced.

Competition and the parallel programme shows took place during last week on six sites in Kazan simultaneously. The public’s attention was particularly drawn to the nominees, all competition shows at Kazan’s Rodina cinema enjoying full house and seeing an over a 12-thousand audience.

Film critics from national and foreign publications earlier in the day voiced their assessments of the 11th Kazan Muslim Film Festival.

“This year the competition programme has been a great success: nearly all pictures have been masterpieces,” Moscow journalist, political scientist and blogger Daria Mitina noted. “I have more than once said and am not afraid to repeat that Kazan Film Festival is one of the best world festivals and probably the first among the Russian ones.”

Following film critics, film directors and crew and cast members of the full-length films shown the day before gathered at the press centre’s round table. Iraqi film director, scriptwriter and producer of A Face in Ashes Shahawan Idres, Iranian Mojtaba Amini, the producer of the film Boundless, director of The Well Mansur Wasati of Uzbekistan, and others, spoke about their works.

The programme at Rodina concluded with a gala premiere of Rent Ayupov’s White Flowers. The audience of the film based on Abdurakhman Absalyamov’s eponymous novel was nearly one thousand. The show took place in all of the cinema’s five halls simultaneously, which turned out to be not enough to accommodate all visitors.

The Kinomax cinema featured a film by Russian director Efim Glebov The Taste of America, presented within the festival’s out-of-competition programme by producer Alexander Lubelsky and film’s star Semen Strugachev.

“The whole of Russia thinks of me as the character in the Specifics of National Hunting film. But as soon as I read the Ulitskaya’s novel, I decided it was the story about me,” the actor shared. “This is why the film is infinitely dear to me. I did everything that depended on me for it: learned English for the shooting in America, learned to dance the tango, even lost 15 kilos in ten days,” Strugachev shared.

A training course Film Time continues at the Kazan’s Mir cinema. Tonight, it will conclude with a short-length film made by laboratory participants in six days, the festival’s press service has said.