Mimesis

One winter day in 1934, Pr. Vangengheim was arrested for sabotage and sent to the Gulag on the Solovki Islands. He decided to hide the truth from his wife and daughter Eleonora, until his execution.

A teacher at a Yakut music school must make a choice between a sacred song from the dark past and love that heralds a bright future.

After her parents’ divorce, six-year-old Vladlena moves from Crimea to Grozny, not yet aware of the changes that lie ahead. When war breaks out in Chechnya, it deeply affects her city and family. Years later, filmmaker Sandu reflects on her childhood in this poetic, autobiographical hybrid film, exploring how cycles of violence shape children—and how healing and change are possible.

In 2020, director Andrei Natotsinsky arrived in Sukhum, and the city greeted him with darkness: no lanterns were lit on the central square or around it. After learning that rolling blackouts are associated with cryptominers, who were attracted to Abkhazia by cheap electricity, Natotsinsky returned with a film crew. To figure out how the contrast between the active mining of cryptocurrency and the general devastation framed by wild landscapes works, he conducted four filming expeditions in three years. However, "Edge of the Night" is not a film about miners, or rather, not so much about them, as in general about a region that has not yet recovered from the war of 92-93, the subsequent conflicts and economic disaster. Immersing himself in local history, talking to a variety of people, watching the arrival and departure of miners, Natotsinsky tries to create an objective — as far as possible — picture of life in Abkhazia.