Diaries and everything I once wrote, I want to burn, destroy! Scatter my ashes, and throw me in the garbage, give to the zoo animals for lunch. I want that films will be the only thing that left of me – that's all!
Kira Muratova
The SOTA Cinema Group film company
is starting work on an international
art project for the 90th anniversary
of the birthday of the incomparable director Kira Muratova, whose name became known throughout the world during her lifetime and became synonymous with the concept of “art
of cinematography”. Her cinema is getting younger and younger, and each of her subsequent films was even freer and more unusual than the previous one.
This is what happens to incomparable – tireless – avant-garde artists. Therefore, her films still confuse viewers and cinematographers around the world.
And so it will always be!
The flagship of the project
will be the international anthology film,
a tribute to Kira Muratova's film
“The Eternal Homecoming”
from recognized directors
from around the world
- Unique exhibition
- A retrospective of the director's films
- The release of a presentational
photo album
THE MULTI-FORMAT
ART PROJECT
World-famous and Ukrainian directors – supporters of Kira Muratova's work – shoot short films about the repetition of life cycles and human relationships, which is the subject of Kira Muratova's latest film – “The Eternal Homecoming”.
Goal:
To focus the attention of the world cultural community on the relevance of Kira Muratova's films and to create an anthology film, which, despite its ominous nature, with its deep meanings, will become a talented work of art with a topical dramatic and social agenda of the day.
THE ANTHOLOGY FILM HOMAGE
“THE ETERNAL HOMECOMING”
Director and screenwriter: Kira Muratova
Production designer: Yevhen Golubenko
Composer: Valentin Silvestrov
Producer: Oleg Kokhan
It is the last film in the director's filmography, her creative testament.
Form: variations of an infinite variety of types and voices, acting styles and schools, expressive gestures and tautologies.
The plot: During a movie audition, different pairs of actors play the same situation. The characters of the future movie are a man and a woman who have not met for many years. They are former classmates, have not seen each other for a hundred years and live in different cities. The hero came here on a business trip and came to his classmate to ask for advice about the love triangle he got into. None of the advice sounds convincing, so the hero gets angry and leaves. But he soon returns, because he has no other friends in this city. And so it goes on and on.
THE ETERNAL HOMECOMING (2012)
Awards and nominations:
2012 - best film in the CIS and Baltic countries
2013 - White Elephant Film Award of the Guild of Film Critics for Best Director
2013 - "Voice" award of young film critics
THE ETERNAL HOMECOMING (2012)
The critical acclaim:
"Kira Muratova's Eternal Homecoming draws you in like a hypnotic whirlpool...."
"a rare film that can compete with Eternal Homecoming in terms of originality, irony and poetry all rolled into one"
"Like any strange movie, Eternal Homecoming allows you to see a metaphor in every frame..."
"it is impossible to tear yourself away from this picture where 'nothing happens' - it wraps you up, leaving the viewer with a pang of pain, without which there is no real art."
"The Eternal Homecoming" is a real time loop...
World premiere at the
Rome International Film Festival
“As they say, "the past doesn't have a subjunctive mood." This screenplay is an attempt to challenge this axiom. It's incredibly interesting to see how different people behave under identical proposed conditions. This gave birth to the form of screen tests as a dramatized life story.
There is also an inexplicable charm in various educational exercises: musical scales, artist studios, dance exercises, mesmerizing rhythmic voice repetitions - vocalizations. And what about the seemingly senseless beauty of poetic rhyme itself? What could be more conventional? What about ballet? What about singing in general? What can be stranger and at the same time more organic? What can provide greater aesthetic pleasure?
Being in the film process here and now, I can only vouch for my current momentary opinion because, over time, it may undergo changes. “
- Kira Muratova
EXPLICATION
WORLD-FAMOUS DIRECTORS
ACTING DUETS ABOUT HATE AND LOVE
DIFFERENT VIEWS AND MIRROR IMAGES
STORIES ABOUT THE ETERNAL CIRCLE OF RETURNS, HOPES, AND DISAPPOINTMENTS
PARTICIPATING COUNTRIES
LOVE CONFESSIONS TO KIRA MURATOVA
SEAN PENN
DIRECTORS/
STARS
AL PACINO
TILDA SWINTON
PIETRO MARCELLO
FANNY ARDANT
MERYL STREEP
JULIETTE BINOCHE
LUCA GUADAGNINO
MYROSLAV SLABOSHPYTSKYI
RENATA LITVINOVA
Oleg Kokhan
AUTHOR OF THE IDEA & PRODUCER
2007 | Two in One | dir. Kira Muratova
2007 | Dummy | dir. Kira Muratova
2008 | Birds of Paradise | dir. Roman Balayan
2008 | And a Warm Heart | dir. Krzysztof Zanussi | Poland – Ukraine
2009 | Melody for a Street Organ | dir. Kira Muratova
2009 | Women Without Men | dir. Shirin Neshat |
Germany – France – Austria – Ukraine
2010 | My Joy | dir. Serhiy Loznitsa
2010 | Chantrapas | dir. Otar Iosseliani
2011 | Innocent Saturday | dir. Aleksander Mindadze
2012 | The Eternal Homecoming | dir. Kira Muratova
2015 | My good Hans | dir. Aleksander Mindadze
2019 | Give Me Liberty | dir. Kirill Mikhanovsky
2021 | Still got to survive | dir. Viacheslav Garmash
“The Soviet nomenklatura not only prevented Kira Muratova from filming, but also did everything possible and impossible to prevent her films from being shown to the world. Her films were banned and censored. For the first time, the window to the world opened when Asthenic Syndrome was selected for the main competition of the 40th Berlin Film Festival, where it won the Silver Bear.
PRODUCER’S EXPLICATION
But this was not enough. Every time we presented Muratova's films at international film forums, we had to open her film world to new viewers who heard her name for the first time and knew nothing about her films. At a time when the world's recognized directors have long since classified Kira Muratova as a unique filmmaker. That is why we have initiated this project - "The Eternal Homecoming" of Kira Muratova to our lives through a film-homage, which will be created by the most talented contemporary authors and young directors, and through an international fund that will facilitate the restoration and dubbing of all Kira Muratova's films for a global retrospective in full. Tilda Swinton's words at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as the support of our initiative by such world-renowned film gurus as Marco Muller and the world media, confirmed that Muratova's work is still relevant.
And Kira Muratova's bold radicalism, in my opinion, should not be perceived as a reproach for Soviet neglect, but as a call to young filmmakers to find their own cinematic language despite all the obstacles and dangers. After all, if we are talking about a real culture-original, vibrant, and forward-looking, not an anemic one frozen in nostalgia and cynicism - we should learn from Kira's ability to find ways to express herself in almost impossible conditions and create a style that is recognizable from the first shot.”
- Oleg Kokhan
Marco Müller
CREATIVE
PRODUCER
A festival guru with more than 40 years of experience (director of the Pesaro, Rotterdam, Locarno, Venice, Rome and Pingyao festivals), an award winning producer and a scholar (currently director of the Film Art Research Centre at Shanghai University).
Producer’s explication
“Since her first films, Kira has built a world that belonged to her only and which she has populated with "Muratovian" characters. A world that none of the political and cultural changes which have taken place in parallel to her film career, has ever managed to slay. She was thus able to pursue her ideal "cinema of irresoluteness" to the very end, without ever looking at fashions and the market, regardless of governments and industry.”
1999 | Seventeen Years | dir. Yuan Zhang
2000 | Blackboards | dir. Samira Makhmalbaf
2000 | Brainstorm | dir. Laís Bodanzky
2001 | No Man’s Land | dir. Danis Tanovic
2001 | Secret Ballot | dir. Babak Payami
2002 | Angel on the Right | dir. Jamshed Usmonov
2003 | Mud | dir. Dervis Zaim
2004 | Tropical Malady | dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
2005 | The Sun | dir. Aleksandr Sokurov
2005 | Face Addict | dir. Edo Bertoglio
2006 | Little Red Flowers | dir. Yuan Zhang
2006 | Grido | dir. Pippo Delbono
Tilda Swinton
PROJECT MEMBER
DIRECTOR
Director’s explication
“When Kira Muratova died in June last year, there was no foot-long obituary in the Western newspapers. This masterly director of 22 films, pioneer of the complex crane maneuver, of tracking shots to give any in Taxi Driver a breathtaking run for its money: her epic, rebarbative, wildly chaotic, furious, visionary films have earned her a revered place in the international—intergalactic—canon for her work of five decades. It’s high time she made it over the wider wire.”
- Tilda Swinton for Metrograph, 2020.
Tilda Swinton
Metrograph vol.25, Spring, 2020
Tilda Swinton
PROJECT MEMBER
DIRECTOR
Director’s explication
"Kira Muratova was a true author who invented her own language, her own cinema, her own country, her own world. It is useless to try to describe or classify her films. You have to watch them to find this incredible sensual experience. To see that her absurdist, sometimes grotesque cinematic world has become a more realistic and accurate reflection of our lives than documentary cinema. After all, she really believed that cinema could change the world."
Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi
2006 | «The Incident»
2009 | «Diagnosis»
2010|Anthology film «Assholes & Arabesques» (short film “Deafness”)
2012|Anthology film «Ukraine, Goodbye!» (short film “Nuclear Waste”)
2014 | «The Tribe»
Upcoming:
«The Tiger»
«War through the Eyes of Animals»
FOREIGN MEDIA
“The viewer, Muratova thought, should encounter the film’s reality as an ornament, a woven carpet, a fabric: completely antisymbolic, and thus anti-ideological; completely antipsychological, and thus antistereotypical. Reality itself, she argued, can only be looked at, admired—not interpreted, understood, or possessed. Reality doesn’t “mean,” it is. As when, in an interview, Muratova is asked: “What do the horses in your films symbolize?” To which she replies: “What do the people symbolize?”
- Timmy Straw for The Paris Review
January 27, 2023.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/01/27/intuitions-ear-on-kira-muratova
“Kira Muratova, who died in 2018, has only now come to be recognised as one of eastern Europe’s greatest directors, after decades under the radar. Soviet censors saw her work as elitist in its experimentation and nihilistic in depicting society as a madhouse, and restricted it from the public. Arthouse canon tastemaker biases kept this hard-to-classify female outlier sidelined. Abrasive, asymmetrical and repetition-based, with a taste for the absurd and grotesque, Muratova’s films are no easy ride – but they are audacious, distinctive and visionary.”
- Carmen Gray for British Film Institute
September 11, 2023.
https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/where-begin-with-kira-muratova
FOREIGN MEDIA
“Muratova’s movies do not yield their meaning easily or repay attention with a conventional emotional payoff, and so require close reading. But there is a fierce, individual intelligence at work.”
- Peter Bradshaw for The Guardian
September 11, 2023.
“Through the 1970s and much of the 1980s, Kira Muratova’s stirring films “Brief Encounters” and “The Long Farewell” went unseen, banned by the Soviet Union.
A blacklist is, obviously, an undesirable home for any worthy feature. But as I watched the exquisite 4K restorations of these two films, I was struck by how much their stories harmonize with their embattled history…The female characters pine, ache and, amplified by the dramas surrounding them, seem to scream: Life is hard! Let us free!”
- Natalia Winkelman for The New Yorker Times
August 24, 2023.
The exhibition “Kira Muratova–90.
The Eternal Homecoming” is a unique art project designed to recreate the world of Muratova's genius.
THE EXHIBITION
Goal: To organize a space where fans
of the work of the legendary Kira Muratova will be able to explore her life and creative path in the context of the era, people and country, attend curatorial guided lectures, as well as take part in panel discussions.
The exhibition will present the original paintings of Kira Muratova's husband and co-author of the films, Yevgeny Golubenko, as well as fragments of documentary
and feature films shot in Kyiv and Odesa, movie posters, letters, photo albums, photos from the film sets, original movie costumes and graphics.
Geography:
the project will be presented in Kyiv, Odesa and other cities of Ukraine,
after which it will go on an international tour as part of the promotional campaign of the anthology film.
Mission:
Preservation in history of the brightest phenomena
in Ukrainian and world culture, to which the work of Kira Muratova definitely belongs.
PHOTO ALBUM
Author: Konstantin Donin
The photo album “Kira Muratova–90.
The Eternal Homecoming”, created
in the best traditions of artistic book publishing, became the first case in the history of modern Ukrainian cinema, when the filming process itself and its ideological source – the director – became a subject of independent artistic interest. The unique photos collected in the album were taken during filming and demonstrate not only the uniqueness and creative obsession of Kira Muratova, but also the director's inseparable connection with her film through her favorite actors.
KIRA MURATOVA–90. THE ETERNAL HOMECOMING
KIRA MURATOVA–90. THE ETERNAL HOMECOMING
SOTA Cinema Group
is a Ukrainian entertainment company, which provides the full range of feature film production services, from development to post-production and festival promotion.
Since 2006, SOTA has completed over 20 feature films in partnership with producers from Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, France, USA and others. The company has had the pleasure of support from ARTE, BAVARIA FILM, CANAL+ and many other international networks promoting co-production in cinema.
We believe that cinema is driven by artistic expression and original stories. Our philosophy has led us to collaborations with renowned international directors with strong, individual voices such as Kira Muratova, Roman Balayan, Krzysztof Zanussi, Sergey Loznica, Otar Ioseliani and Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy among others.
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