Oleg Mavromatti. Lecture and film screening

Wednesday, 16 August 2017, 19:00

Lecture by Oleg Mavromatti
Post-cinema. Theory and Practice

and pre premiere screening of his film
Monkey Ostrich and Grave

Artist and filmmaker Oleg Mavromatti will be talking about his films and his Post-cinema Manifesto written together with artist Boryana Rossa. The manifesto reflects their fascination by the YouTube culture, which gives unique opportunities for filmmaking, not known before. The manifesto explains how new technology and its social impact change the way we see and express the world through moving images. Mavromatti will illustrate his lecture with excerpts from his last film Monkey Ostrich and Grave (2017) and the earlier No Place for Fools (2015), which has already had international success and is created entirely off of YouTube videos. Mavromatti will relate these new films to his Bastards (2000) which is definitely a predecessor of the new ones, being some sort of prophecy of how media and society will develop in the new era of mobile Internet and vlogging.

Monkey Ostrich and Grave is the story of the video blogger Genadi Gorin of Lugansk (the capital of the new republic, which appeared during the Russian/Ukrainian war in 2014), whose life floats parallel to the horrific reality of the unfinished conflict. This is a film about the people, who live in places of endless wars – wars, forgotten by everybody: the world news, the politicians, and the human rights organizations. Many of them have no other option but to continue living together with these wars, desensitized to the destruction around them and constantly burying their own suffering in the sub-conscious. This hidden pain, one can’t get rid of, sublimates in intimate revelations to the online audience and in fantasies about revenge. Gorin expresses this in the variety of art genres – from comedy to horror, from drawings to magic. His story is thick of surprising tales and events that merge reality and dream.

Film by Oleg Mavromatti
Starring: Viktor Vin4 Lebedev
Script: Oleg Mavromatti
Cast: Anna Den, Egor Schimanko
Camera: Viktor Vin4 Lebedev
Editing: Oleg Mavromatti, Boryana Rossa
Based on the original YouTube blog by Genadi Gorin
Producers: Marat Gelman, Boryana Rossa, Andrey Silvestrov

A discussion with Oleg Mavromatti and Skype conversation with Viktor Vin4 Lebedev will take place after the screening.

Oleg Mavromatti is an artist, representative of Moscow Actionism, filmmaker, producer, and vlogger. He is under federal investigation in Russia for his artistic action Do Not Believe Your Eyes. He has been based in New York since 2012. He runs his own YouTube channel.

Admission is free.

Supported by: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in Ukraine

ERSTE Stiftung and Charles Stewart Mott Foundation