The 6th edition of the Odessa International Film Festival takes place from 10 to 18 July. Traditionally, within the festival the biggest open-air screening in the country will take place at the famous Potemkin Stairs - an event which every year gathers 15000 viewers. With the support of the British Council in Ukraine, British minimalist composer Michael Nyman will come to Odessa with his chamber orchestra, the Michael Nyman Band to play his score for the silent film Man with a Movie Camera (director: Dziga Vertov).
Michael Nyman is one of Britain's most innovative and celebrated composers, known for numerous film scores. His soundtrack for Jane Campion's film The Piano was awarded BAFTA Award and Golden Globe and sold over three million copies. Nyman's most notable scores include a dozen Peter Greenaway films, including such classics as The Draughtsman's Contract and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, several Michael Winterbottom features and the Hollywood blockbuster Gattaca. The soundtrack for Man with a Movie Camera was presented for the first time in 2002 at London's Royal Festival Hall.
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is an experimental film by one of the pioneers of documentary film-making, radical Soviet filmmaker David Kaufman, widely known by his pseudonym Dziga Vertov. Over a period of three years Vertov, with his brother, cameraman Michael Kaufman, filmed the life of the modern city on the streets of Odessa, Kyiv and Moscow, to create a 66-minute urban kaleidoscope. The movie has no plot, script, titles, actors or decorations. The only protagonist is a man with a camera, filming the world around him.
Vertov's ‘urban symphony’ was criticized by his contemporaries, called ‘cine-hooliganism’ and forgotten, along with its author. Dziga Vertov was brought back to the cinema by the representatives of the Nouvelle Vague in the 1960s. Since then, Man with a Movie Camera has become a textbook of cinematic techniques. Vertov inspired filmmakers of Cinéma Vérité, Godard, and Truffaut as well as the Dogma group of cinematographers headed by Lars von Trier.
In 2012, the film was ranked 8th in the top 50 best films of all time by Sight and Sound - and in 2014 Sight and Sound named Man with a Movie Camera the best documentary ever made.
The screening of Man with a Movie Camera with the original soundtrack performed by Michael Nyman Band will take place at the Potemkin Stairs in Odessa on 11th July 2015. Admission is free.