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It goes without saying that not all the innovators whose works overwhelmed the Cannes and Venice in the 1960s found their way to the Moscow festival venues.



but MIFF programs of the early 1960s carried the names of

competition and out-of-competition programs of the MIFF featured the names of foreign filmmakers who re-invented the very notion of cinema in their works, who renounced classical forms, rejected acknowledged classical masters. And incidentally, sometimes they made use of the practices of “renunciation” tested by Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s.

The Festival was attended by well-known stars of the time like

Binka Zhelyazkova, Konrad Wolf, Mircea Dragan, Jiří Sequens, Zoltan Fabri, András Kovács, István Szabó, Andrzej Wajda, Manuel Octavio Gómez demonstrated their first filmic achievements.

As might be expected cinematographies of socialist countries enjoyed wider representation at the Festival.

Among the Festival guests were numerous film classics who used the new opportunity to learn about the country which had just lifted the veil off its cultural life. The Moscow Festival welcomed

Anna Magnani, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pietro Germi, Lillian Gish, Dmitri Tyomkin, Fred Zinnemann, Michel Simon, Dino Risi, Carol Reed, Jacques Tati, Pierre Étaix.

Most certainly there was no room at the Festival for the “angry young men” from disturbed Czechoslovakia, gloomy depressed Hungary, restive Poland and Yugoslavia with its striking outbursts of non-socialist realist emotions.


It is impossible to imagine festival screenings of the early films by Milos Forman and his comrades, of Věra Chytilová’s “Daisies”, of the provocative creations by Dušan Makavejev or of the anti-totalitarian frescos by Andrzej Wajda.


Ideological hypocrisy which became a standard of life in the USSR in the 1970-1980s, had its effect on the festival program. For the greater part it featured the “correct” films from socialist countries and not the very best samples from the West which usually had a one-sided anti-bourgeois flavor. During the Brezhnev times the Festival could not function as an objective mirror of world cinema where one peak followed another. The French New Wave, the American Independents which gave a serious incentive to the development and shaping of New Hollywood – all these phenomena had no direct relation to the MIFF. Such films could be seen only at semi-official screenings which caused incredible commotion.

To see the immensity of this appeal it is sufficient to list the names of the Jury members at the XVth MIFF

( a former dissident and now almost an acknowledged classic )

The Jury was composed of

( rehabilitated by the new ideologists )

( who surprised the Russian audience with his “The Pointsman” )

( who had already achieved the superstar status)

( the winner of the Berlin Festival )

The Festival seethed with premiers, heated debates at the Filmmakers’ Professional Club PROK in the House of the Filmmakers lasted long past midnight.

This lively atmosphere which lingered for many years sometimes adversely affected the programmatic discipline; the competition program was composed rather arbitrarily and true masterpieces went side by side with casual films.

For the sake of justice it must be noted that sometimes the films that came to the attention of the Festival were made by directors who in a few years would become renowned masters like

Aki Kaurismäki, Atom Egoyan, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Asghar Farhadi, Boris Khlebnikov and Alexei Popogrebsky.

The Festival now had a well-coordinated team and advocated greater discipline in programming and screenings.

Over the years it has become a well-established cultural and social phenomenon.

The Film Market held as part of the MIFF has strengthened its presence and aroused enormous interest of the distributors. A noteworthy feature of the MIFF is its retrospectives which invariably arouse public interest. The audience reacquaint themselves with the movies which were once denied access to the USSR but are now shown on big screens and often these are restored versions.


Among the most notable retrospectives of the past few years are those devoted to John Cassavetes, Marco Ferreri, Claude Chabrol, Sergio Leone, Werner Herzog, Costa-Gavras, Ernst Lubitsch, Yonfan, Bernardo Bertolucci, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ulrich Seidl, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Michael Apted, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand, Takeshi Kitano, to American classical musicals and many others.