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The high point at the 12th St. Petersburg Festival of Festivals (23-30 June 2004) in this splendid baroque city came on the day before the festival closed with an enchanting candle-light dinner in the Manezh (Exhibition Hall) of Menshikov Palace on the banks of the Neva. The occasion was the posthumous celebration of the 100th birthday of actor-documentarist Valery Solovtsov, who played a lead role in Eduard Johanson and Friedrich Ermler’s Katka ­ bumazhnyr anyot (Katka’s Reinette Apples) (Lenfilm, 1926), the story of a girl from the country who sells apples on the street-corners of Leningrad to make ends meet but unfortunately is seduced by a conniving conman during the heady period of the New Economic Policy (NEP). The silent classic was accompanied on the piano by jazz musician Yury Gomberg-Sobolov, who had been preparing his score for the presentation since last March and intoned a »Happy Birthday« greeting to the screen idol at the very moment of Solovtsov’s first appearance in the film. The applause by a packed house of St. Petersburg cineastes was warm, generous, and heart-felt for a native son who, as a documentarist, had chronicled the tragic sufferings of Leningrad citizens during the wartime blockade.

On that same evening festival director Alexander Mamontov programmed Marina Razbezhkina’s Vremya Zhatviy (Harvest Time), a debut feature by a graduate of Kazan University in the Republic of Tatarstan. As portrayed in Katka’s Reinette Apples, the heroine in Harvest Time is a hard-working country woman who drives a thresher on a collective farm. Since her husband has returned home from the Great Patriotic War as an invalid, she and her young sons have to master their fate on their own in difficult times. Just as poetically rendered as it is deftly narrated, an off-camera dialogue between the mother and the older son reveals that the latter has died in the Afghanistan conflict. Harvest Time, reminiscent of Swiss director Fredi M. Murer’s rural Höhenfeuer (Alpine Fire) (1985), is memorable for its striking images ­ and it should be noted that camerawoman Irina Uralskaya had served jury member at the 2003 Leipzig DOKfestival, where she was also honored with retrospective tribute. Harvest Time, awarded Best Russian Film at St. Petersburg and the FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize at the Moscow International Film Festival (whose calendar dates mutually overlap), is next scheduled for the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

The Audience Prize was awarded to Ivan Fila’s König der Diebe (King of Thieves), a German-Austrian-Czech-Slovak coproduction about a gypsy boy from the Ukraine who with his sister is exploited for his circus talents. The young acting pair, natives of St. Petersburg, were celebrated onstage during the awards ceremony at Dom Kino, while Fila himself hurried off for the film’s next screening at Filmfest München. The festival’s Grand Prize was awarded to Pedro Almodovar’s La mala educación (Bad Education) (Spain), about sexual abuse in a Catholic boarding school, which had previously opened the Cannes film festival. And the Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, who was on hand for an all-embracing retrospective tribute.

An honorary award should also be given to charismatic festival director Alexander Mamontov, who founded the festival twelve years ago and programs it annually against the backdrop of one of Europe’s opulent cultural and artistic events ­ the illustrious White Nights of St. Petersburg. For those who didn’t care to stroll the streets of a lively city during the wee hours, there was always the nightly program of Regina Ziegler’s Erotic Tales to savour in Dom Kino.

Ron and Dorothea Holloway