MOSCOW.- Garage announced that it has selected Evgeny Gusyatinskiy as its 2018 curator of Garage Screen, the museum's popular outdoor summer film program that brings Muscovites movies that would be otherwise difficult to see in Russia—one of the many programming developments designed to bring visitors to Garage this summer for its 10th anniversary.
Gusyatinskiy is an acclaimed film critic and journalist, as well as the editor of Iskusstvo Kino ("The Art of the Cinema"), the oldest film magazine in Europe. Since 2011 he has programed the International Film Festival Rotterdam, which boasted 329,000 attendees in 2018.
"Moscow's cinephile community is dedicated, but atomized because the distribution of art house films is quite limited in Russia, and there is no place in Moscow that would present the variety of auteur cinema on a regular basis," Gusyatinskiy said. "I'm thrilled to help Garage curate a home for the films that people really want to see, but otherwise wouldn't be able to, whether they're new, old, or simply overlooked."
This summer's film program is broken into four broad topics: "First Features," which emphasize directors earlier works, "Premieres" which highlight films recently debuted at film festivals around the world, "Sources & Influences" which examine profoundly influential works like Jacques Tati's Playtime, in its newly restored 4k format, and "Experiments," which is dedicated to hardcore avant garde cinema that walk the line between films and contemporary art.
The opening film for this year’s season is Pity (2018), an absurdist comedy by Babis Makridis. Makridis co-wrote the paradoxical story of a contemporary man without a character with Efthymis Filippou—one of the pioneers of the Greek new wave, who has collaborated with Yorgos Lanthimos on Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Pity premiered at Sundance in January 2018. Other highlights from the upcoming season include the French-Japanese animation Mutafukaz (2017), Jan Švankmajer’s Insect (2018), and Union of the North (2017), the collaboration between Matthew Barney and Iceland Dance Company..
This year the project is supported by Farfetch, the global technology platform for the fashion industry. Garage Screen is a part of Farfetch’s commitment to support bold and extraordinary projects in the worlds of fashion and art. All films will be shown at the Garage Screen Summer Cinema, designed by GRACE architects Ekaterina Golovatyuk and Giacomo Cantoni, and featuring a 1980s-style mirrored façade with a neon sign, just outside the museum proper in Gorky Park.
"Film is just one of the many means by which we engage with various communities in Russia," said chief curator Kate Fowle. "There's something for everyone in Evgeny's program and I can't wait to see how Garage's visitors interact with them."
