Faites un Voeu

In the Cold War years of the 1970s, an American patrol boat meets a Soviet ship off the east coast of the United States for talks about fishing rights in the Atlantic. In the midst of this, while Russian commanders are aboard the U.S. Coast Guard vessel where the talks are being held, a Lithuanian sailor jumps across the ten feet of icy water separating the boats. Crash-landing on the deck of the American ship, he desperately begs for asylum. Though they try, the Americans ultimately fail to provide protection and the Soviets are allowed to capture him and brutally return him to their vessel. Thus begins a stranger-than-fiction story of imprisonment, discovery, fame, and freedom. Through rare archival footage and a dramatic first-person re-enactment of that fateful day by Simas Kudirka, the would-be defector himself, this tale of one of the biggest Cold War muddles takes us on a journey of uncanny twists of fate, and the emotional sacrifices of becoming a universal symbol of freedom.

Anna Grigoryevna, an ordinary Soviet woman, dreamed of a trip to Paris for thirty years. And in 1986, during perestroika, she finally finds herself in the city of her dreams. Her husband and son give her a camera, but because of an excess of emotions, she forgets all the instructions and brings the film, which, when developed, turned out to be a marriage. Recently, the adult son of Anna Grigoryevna found a film. And I decided that this is modern art! He walks around the studios, exhibition curators, they laugh at him, this story is incomprehensible to his mother, his girlfriend is not interested in it. And between these walks, a life passes in which each of these women claims her rights to him.

Amani is 31. When he was an infant, he survived the genocide against Rwanda’s Tutsi population. Three decades later, Amani has set up an organisation in Nyamirambo, one of the more economically impoverished districts of the country’s capital, Kigali. It employs creativity, artistic practice and performance to grapple with poverty and generational trauma – acknowledging that deep-seated ideologies can easily foment prejudice and create an environment that proved so catastrophic in the past.