A modern fairy tale with scientists, partisans, cosmonauts, officials, and the Motherland. The scientist and his assistant are collecting the ingredients for an elixir that can resurrect dead people to life. At the same time, officials are looking for the carpenter who has a power to transmute water into oil.

Elixir

Composer Alexander Knaifel’s work A Silly Horse consists of 15 stories for a singer and piano. Each story has its title, and these titles were used to find newsreel clips from the 20th century, which have nothing in common except that they are archive material. The music and the image magically combine to create the story of a boy who hears and sees only the words “Why dreams”, which gave this film its name.

Why Dreams

Rain does not caress the skin, the wind resists blowing, a soul is like a doll forgotten in the house of glass. Tikhon Pendurin’s piece “Death of Cinema” is a dream of a film, the process of falling asleep, a frozen cosmos, the liturgy of a sigh. Fotogénie, a return to the forgotten magic of magician Segundo de Chomon, the mystery of Val del Omar, Alain Resnais surreal theatricality “Death of Cinema” seems to absorb all the magic of cinema and confesses its own forgetfulness. The characters of “Death of Cinema” stand before the justice of truth, naive children turned with pride away from the audience. Here, the main thing is the hallucination of light, a whisper, a prayer, the bewildered physiognomy of cinema, which allowed itself to laugh at its own seriousness. (by Karina Karaeva)