Film Director Ali Khamraev was awarded in St. Petersburg for his contribution to cinema

“When you come to the age of majority,” Ali Khamraev joked, receiving the award from the hands of film director and festival president Alexei Uchitel, “it’s time to receive congratulations in the form of a wonderful prize, which has been awarded to talented people for 36 years.” “Message to Man” appeals to the human heart, and this is the most important thing for which we work in cinema. We will continue to work while our feet are worn.”.

A year ago, Ali Khamraev’s retrospective took place in New York, which included his “White, White Storks”, “Without Fear”, “Seventh Bullet”, “Man Goes After Birds”, “I Remember You”. In his filmography there are also “Triptych”, “Garden of Wishes”, “Hot Summer in Kabul”, “Bo Ba Bu”, which, as Alexei Uchitel said, shake with their poetic language. “Yesterday I go online and read that in a few days Ali Ergashevich will be awarded the Golden Globe Award, but we are still the first, and they are the second,” he said from the stage.

We are talking about the new Meridian Award, which will be presented in Tashkent during the Silk Road Tribute Gala in Tashkent on the initiative of the organizers of the American Golden Globe Film Award. Celebrating outstanding figures of film and television in Central Asia and the Caucasus

So from St. Petersburg, Hamraev will immediately fly to Tashkent, the city where he was born in the family of the founder of Uzbek cinema Ergash Khamraev, who died during World War II. The younger Khamraev graduated from the directorial faculty of VGIK and has since been shooting around the world.

A year ago, he presented at the “Message to Man” his documentary “The Lilac Wind of Parajanov”, which was shot for the 100th anniversary of the birth of the main character, film director Sergei Parajanov. And now he will present the long-suffering “Evening” Marlene Khutsiev, the centenary of whose birth was also recently celebrated. This is not a working version presented in Moscow in the House of Culture "HPP-2", but the final.

The film was completed by Ali Khamraev with the participation of Alexander Sokurov’s pupil, Andrei Netotsinsky, at the request of Igor Khutsiev, the director’s son.

The international jury of the festival was led by Portuguese director Sergio Trefo, who described himself as a homeless dog living between the three countries. We can name Portugal and France, where he once studied at the Sorbonne. The third is a mystery. The world premiere of his latest feature film “The Bride” took place in 2022 at the Venice Film Festival. Trefo is one of the founders of the world famous festival DocLisboa. Russian premieres of his films “Treblinka” and “Paradise” took place once on “Message to Man”.

On the opening day, Trefo remembered the participants of this festival of previous years - Sergey Dvortsev, Viktor Kosakovsky, Sergei Loznica, awarded a year ago to his French colleague Silvan Georges. “I’m happy that the movie is still alive and we can watch it in cinemas, in smartphones, on the Internet,” he said.

It also includes director and musician Adnan Baraka from Morocco, his colleague Massa Sene Absa from Senegal, who recently opened a festival of African culture in Moscow, director, actress, student of Sergei Solovyov Stasya Tolstaya. They are personally present at the festival. American director, editor, cameraman and actress Lori Felker will work remotely from Chicago. Each of these filmmakers was asked to succinctly answer the question of what is most important in cinema. Adnan Baraka said it speaks of the invisible, and there is no better definition.