Obkhodniye puti

There is a text by Thom Andersen in which he says one of the smoke shots in James Benning’s 11X14 made him fall off his chair laughing. It was written in 1978, long before they became teaching colleagues at a film school in California, CalArts. Years later, the joy that comes from encountering this particular kind of structural wit – of framing, timing, and editing, of animating ordinary things in and beyond themselves – comes from another “CalArtian” in the form of Ekaterina Selenkina and her film DETOURS. Unlike its antecedents, there is a small plot in this film, which revolves around the dark web, drugs and Dennis, a young man who hides his various stashes in the urban landscape. The film is both a detailed observation of this wonderful, terrible world we live in and the need – the responsibility – to match this world’s texture with what stems from cinema. Each of Selenkina and Kurbatov’s frames (a cinematographer whose talent and luminosity has no limits) are full of electrifyingly political ideas. Why do we even watch movies? It’s all there, brief glimpses of precise beauty: the way a line escapes in and out the frame, the shadow of one building falling onto another, or a pseudo-lake surrounded by concrete. (Lucía Salas)

In the presence of Ekaterina Selenkina and Vladimir Nadein (producer).

Ekaterina Selenkina: STORGE (2017, K)