The Karo.Art Film Festival, taking place in Moscow from October 10 to 15, announced the cancellation of the screening of the film “Fairy Tale” directed by Alexander Sokurov.
According to the program, Sokurov’s new film was supposed to close the five-day network festival KARO at the Oktyabr cinema on Novy Arbat. The organizers did not give reasons for the decision.
According to the director himself, the show was canceled at the request of the Ministry of Culture.
“We are now trying to find out the motivation. There are big problems ahead in life — just like in Soviet times, when all my works were banned from being shown. The time of my life has stopped again,” Sokurov’s representatives quote him on his telegram channel. — Obviously, there is a refusal to issue the “Fairy Tale” ahead. distribution certificate — a censorious ban on showing the film in my homeland. And an unspoken ban on showing all my previously created cinematographic works.”
“I’m not just protesting against censorship — I’m protesting against the violation of my constitutional right to freely communicate my works with my compatriots,” added the director.
The film premiered in August 2022 on Film Festival in Locarno. It was shown at several other venues, including in June in St. Petersburg at the “Example of Intonation” festival from the Sokurov Foundation of the same name and in early October in Moscow at a closed screening hosted byKsenia Sobchak.
Medusa called “The Tale” in its review “the director’s most experimental and radical film about the destructive nature of power, where in the plot Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Churchill meet in hell.”