On September 11 and 12, the 10th anniversary Festival of Silent Cinema and Contemporary Music "Mute Nights" will take place in Odessa. The co-organizers of the festival are the Dovzhenko Center and the Odessa Museum of Modern Art and the Green Theater - the main locations of the event.

Silent Film and Contemporary Music Festival "Mute Nights" is an annual film festival aimed at popularizing and rethinking silent film classics by means of modern music.

The festival was founded by Ivan Kozlenko and Kateryna Maltseva in 2010 in Odessa as a tribute to the city, which began the rapid development of Ukrainian cinema in the 1920s, culminating in the creation of a number of world masterpieces and the formation of one of Europe's most powerful national film industries.

For more than ten years of the festival's existence in Kyiv and Odessa more than 60 silent films were shown (many of which were previously considered lost) accompanied by live musicians from Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Germany, Azerbaijan, Italy, Great Britain, Ireland, USA, Mexico and Japan.

Mute Nights has become the largest silent film festival in Eastern Europe and the main Ukrainian archival film festival, gaining the fame of exquisite and intellectual action.

Schedule

September 11, 18:30

Odessa Museum of Modern Art

"Silent Nights" will open on September 11 at 18:30 with a pop-up exhibition of posters of all years of the festival at the Odessa Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition will last only two days, admission is free.

On September 11, at 7:30 pm, a chamber screening of the Dovzhenko Center's film programme "Urban Symphonies: Experimental Urbanism of the 1920s" with live music performed by Odessa composer Roxana Smirnova will take place in the courtyard of the Museum.

The City Symphony is a unique documentary film genre that was born in the 1920s, when films, documentary in nature, experimental in content and poetic in mood, began to appear in the wake of the general fascination with cinema. The programme will show films that capture the youth of European cities: Tbilisi, London, New York, Nice.

The cost of a ticket for the first day of the festival - a chamber film screening on September 11 at the Odessa Museum of Modern Art - UAH 150. You can buy a ticket on the spot.

The number of tickets is limited, so please fill out the registration form.

September 12, 19:00

Green Theater

The main programme of the festival will start on September 12 at 19:00 in the Green Theater. Given the risks of quarantine restrictions, it will last for one day and will consist of three sets.

19:00 - The first set of the festival, dedicated to the Ukrainian-German silent film star Xenia Desni, will begin with a screening of the melodrama "Merry-Go-Round", shot in Sweden in 1923 by Hollywood film director of Ukrainian origin Dimitri Buchowetzki, accompanied by Arsen Adabashyan and Andriy Pokaz.

20:25 - As part of the second set, dedicated to the Ukrainian and French silent film star Natalia Lissenko, a French film by Jean Epstein "Double Love" (1925) will be shown, accompanied by Kyiv composer and DJ Oleksiy Podat.

22:20 - The third set of the festival will be a masterpiece of the Ukrainian film avant-garde - the film symphony "In Spring" (1929) directed by Mikhail Kaufman, accompanied by the famous Ukrainian composer Alexander Kokhanovsky.

Buy a signle ticket for 3 movies

The main task of the festival is to popularize silent cinema created in Ukraine and abroad by Ukrainian filmmakers, to demonstrate Ukrainian-European cultural influences and cultural interpenetration, to reveal the urban component of Ukrainian culture of the 1920s and 1930s.

The festival aims to return to Ukraine undeservedly forgotten or banned names of popular in the West actors, directors, artists of Ukrainian origin, who made a significant contribution to the history of world cinema in the first third of the 20th century, but in Ukraine still remain unknown. Such a return is a symbolic act of cultural "repatriation" and at the same time a reverse transplant of artistic experience and contributes to the "completion" of Ukrainian modern urban culture.

At the same time, the festival returns to the modern artistic context Ukrainian films by Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Dzyga Vertov, Ivan Kavaleridze, recognised as masterpieces of the world film avant-garde. The deep goal of the festival is to overcome the dumbness and cultural amnesia of Ukrainian modern culture.

Festival partners:

Dovzhenko Center, Odessa City Council, Odessa Museum of Contemporary Art, Green Theater, French Institute in Kyiv, British Council in Ukraine.