At the Competition 'WOWMOSCOW' Director from Indonesia Makes Film about 'Soul of Moscow'
The International Competition of Short Videos about Cities 'WOWMOSCOW' organised by the Moscow City Tourism Committee and HSE Art and Design School, announced the results. On August 24 in the framework of the festival and forum 'Territory of the Future. Moscow 2030', the small amphitheatre of the park 'Zaryadye' featured the premiere of the film 'Soul of Moscow' by Takha Audyarahma from Indonesia. The idea of this film was named the best in the final of the competition.
The participants of 'WOWMOSCOW' visited the capital at the beginning of August. Especially for them, the organisers developed an eventful programme with visits to various locations in the city, including the Red Square, the parks 'Zaryadye', 'Tsaritsyno' and 'Kolomenskoe', VDNH, Arbat, Gostiny Dvor as well as several metro stations and buildings of HSE Art and Design School at Malaya Pionerskaya Street. Each of them actively prepared for presenting their film ideas as a result of which the winner got an opportunity to implement the project. The presentation of ideas was held on August 14, and the first place was taken by Takha Audyarahma, a student of the Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember (ITS), a partner university of HSE University-St Petersburg.
Among the finalists of the competition also were:
Li jiaxin Li, China,—Quietly hiding on the banks of Lijiang River
Feofan Uspenskiy (co-authors—Ulyana Schukina, Vladislav Protsenkov), Russia,—City's Breath
Laura Grazziotin, Brazil,—The city that hurts
José ricardo Gonçalves val, Brazil,—Curitiba: Urban Maze
Hadi Sheibani, Iran,—Mashhad: A City of Unwavering Cultural Flourishment
Umang Tyagi, India,—Haridwar: Gateway to God | Cinematic video
Yiping Zhao (co-authors—Haoyang Liu, Wenxin Zhu, Peijie Wu), China,—The Stone Statue of the Tang Imperial Mausoleum, Series-1
Pritam Patowary, India,—Rongali (ৰঙালী): Colors of Nature
Nikolay Kukin (co-author—Evgeny Makarov), Russia,—'Город на воде' ('City on Water')
'The Competition of Short Videos about Cities, in which authors and young specialists from different countries present their visions of modern cities, and show how they can use the video format to promote locations, is a very logical development of many of our students' initiatives. We are grateful to the capital Tourism Committee for the opportunity to become co-organisers of such an event, the format of which is similar to the educational process at the Art and Design School', shares Natalia Logutova, Deputy Head of HSE Art and Design School. She added that during the application period, the participants of the competitive selection had an opportunity to attend workshops, expand their knowledge, and use it to prepare and present their projects.
'We managed to unite our curators (Ivan Tverdovskiy, creative supervisor of the track 'Screen Arts', juror of online and offline stages) and involve partner universities from India, Turkey, Indonesia and Bangladesh, students of which took an active part, and many of them reached the final',—says Natalia Logutova.
The competition, which gathered 294 applications of participants from 12 countries, was held in the framework of the forum and festival 'Territory of the Future. Moscow 2030'. This forum introduced Moscow residents and guests to the main innovations in all spheres of city life.
After the demonstration of two films—the competitive 'Soul of Moscow' and the film about how the competition went—there was a public interview with the director Takha Audyarahma and the film producer Daria Gladysheva. The meeting moderator asked the film author, what three words she associated with the Russian capital before the arrival. 'These are liveliness, architecture and post-punk', she answered.
In her film, Takha Audyarahma showed how Moscow immersed a person in its landscapes, made the main character 'pay attention to what was going on around them, see the beauty of the city and try to feel it'. 'The colours used in the video help to demonstrate different states of the character during everything that was happening', explains Takha Audyarahma.
Thanks to the competition, Moscow citizens who also took part in the filming process managed to learn more about their native city, Daria Gladysheva believes. 'It's as if we walked in their shoes. And it was extremely interesting,'—the producer remarked. The film was shot in just three days, and, she said, it could be considered 'turbo production': 'We didn't even manage to sleep, it was very quick'.
During several weeks in Moscow, Takha Audyarahma realised how different everything here was from Indonesia: from cuisine to architecture. 'However, despite our differences, our cultures are equally bright and dynamic', she adds.