Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love —but the greatest of these is love.
In July, September, and December of 2023, Spectacle watched the seasons pass across nine features made over the course of the first few creatively explosive years of Russian expat Vadim Kostrov’s forays into his unique approach to personal filmmaking. While unable to travel to the United States during these screenings, Kostrov generously stayed up into the wee hours in his current home of Paris to call in the theater and discuss a stunning bouquet of work that captured the atmospheric shifts and burgeoning lives of idealistic young artists, mostly within his home city Nizhny Tagil.
Just after one year in which we held screenings of Kostrov’s second piece in his incomplete seasons tetralogy, FALL, it comes with great delight to announce that the filmmaker will make his first —and no doubt far from last— in-person appearance at the goth bodega to present three pivotal and seasonally-aligned short films.
STILL FREE (set in the late summer) along with I SAW and THE LAST LOOK OF AUTUMN (both in the fall) represent various departures, epilogues, and transitions in the life of Kostrov and the friends that make up his pool of subjects and collaborators.
This will be the United States premieres of I SAW and STILL FREE, and the world premiere of THE LAST LOOK OF AUTUMN!
MONDAY, OCTOBER 14 – 7PM w/ Q&A
STILL FREE
Dir. Vadim Kostrov, 2023.
Russia. 31 min.
In Russian with English subtitles.
Not dissimilar from Kostrov’s stellar feature-length couples portrait, ADA AND MAXIM, the diary footage shot in 2020 that makes up STILL FREE is another example of Kostrov’s ability to provide a welcoming gaze on the idealism of young romance, this time between Katya and her boyfriend Kostya, who will soon leave to join the Russian military from their town of Svobodny (which translates to English as “Free”). While the former film spotlights pockets of warmth in a desolate winter, STILL FREE plays as an inverse, a harbinger of war and upturned lives for those in front and behind the camera, amidst the crowded revelry of late summer beach-going.
I SAW
2022. Russia.
29 min.
In Russian with English subtitles.
An epilogue of sorts to the NARODNAYA trilogy, I SAW features an always welcome return for Kostrov mainstays Gosha Gordienko (seen over the course of seasons in ORPHEUS, SUMMER, NARODNAYA, AFTER NARODNAYA, and COMET) and Matvey Bedin as they piece together a new song for their band, Lazy Comet, in a dimly natural lit apartment. As with all of Kostrov’s work, the mundane and the divine are one and the same, as a home studio crossfades into a spread of autumnal hues.
THE LAST LOOK OF AUTUMN
(LE DERNIER REGARD DE L’AUTOMNE)
2023. Russia.
25 min.
Shot in the Urals during fall 2021, THE LAST LOOK OF AUTUMN comprises the last images Kostrov filmed in the region before leaving Russia in March, 2022. Edited after his move to Paris, the film takes on the quality of a solemn departure as locations and landmarks that have appeared in previous work are shadowed in the dark oranges and yellows of sunset. Perhaps classifiable as one of Kostrov’s landscape films, it stands out because of its unsettled framing. No longer on a tripod, the camera trembles in the filmmaker’s hands, his breath interwoven with the sounds of the environment.
Total running time: 85 min.