IX Side by Side LGBT Film Festival, Saint Petersburg, 2016 IX Side by Side LGBT Film Festival, 2016 | Page 13

Alisa Tayozhnaya
Alisa (was born 1986, Moscow) writes about cinema and contemporary culture for
The Village, Wonderzine, Afisha, Interview, and GQ. She runs the Youth & Truth film
club and lectures on the history of cinema and art. A graduate of the Higher School
of Economics and the Manege/MediaArtLab Open School, she has studied at the
Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and Anatoly Osmolovsky’s BAZA Institute.
«The most interesting thing in
culture is the conversation about
humanity and human beings, about
differences between personal and
collective experience, about how
people grow, change, and turn into
new selves. The cinema of recent
years makes quite palpable the sense
that personal stories are innovative
and genuinely captivating compared
with commercial cinema’s genre
films. Very complicated things
are portrayed more convincingly
in documentary and socially engaged
cinema. They speak in a quiet tone to
the audience, making unusual worlds
familiar, tangible, and intelligible.
Cinema’s
principal
quality
is creating the impression that
viewers can reach out and touch
the main characters, live the lives
they live, embrace their experience,
and look at events with new eyes.
I
appreciate
the
curiosity
of audiences and their interest
in other viewpoints. I look forward
to films I have not seen yet expanding
my knowledge of the world.
Openness and receptivity are
the most valuable human qualities.
I think it vital that Russia serve
as a venue for events that make us
rethink our present and our history,
human relations, and the opinions
we share with others. The media
are chockablock with discrimination
and degrading stereotypes about
people who are not like us. I support
all grassroots cultural efforts
to fight these stereotypes».
Augustas čičelis
Augustas comes from Vilnius, Lithuania, and is a part of Vilnius LGBT* Festival
Kreivės. He has an academic background in gender studies and has been involved
in LGBT* activism and wider human rights movement for about a decade. Augustas
has started to combine his passion for activism and cinema in 2012, joining
an LGBT* film festival in Vilnius, which then developed into Kreivės – a wider
annual cultural festival, providing a unique space for film screenings, events and
community building.
«The importance of Side by Side cannot be overestimated in today’s shifting
environments. For years closely following the festival and being fascinated
by its development, I am very pleased and honoured to be able to be a small
part of it this year».
Anastasia Postnikova
Anastasia is a singer, keyboard player, and percussionist with the band Iva Nova and her own
solo project, Aisatsana. She studied philology at the Pskov Pedagogical Institute, and then
sociology at St. Petersburg State University before doing a stint as a journalist. Music has been
her only pursuit since 2005. Iva Nova has performed at various polystylistic music festivals
in Russia and abroad. The group performed at Petersburg’s QueerFest in 2009 and 2011.
«I cannot imagine my life without music, books and movies. They are filled
with humanity, its diversity, vastness and mystery, its foolishness, value, and
sensitivity, everything that makes us so different and so much the same as people.
I look forward to watching the films at Side by Side, because the festival is where
you can see movies not often available to a wide audience».