Sacred Ground written and directed by Sergey Kozmin will be shown at Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Buenos Aires, in New Directors programme.
28 February
Some time ago they would come here to walk their dogs, play with their kids or jog. Today they are two hostile parties fighting over a patch of ground in a park.
Every Sunday half of them come to pray by a wooden cross, and another half is there to defend a small spot of land, which they want to stay public.
Who could have imagined such a confrontation in a country which had been fully secular, even atheistic for decades? Still, a collision between orthodox believers and local dwellers, who don’t want to have a new church instead of a park or a public garden is quite common in the Russian capital these days.
“200 Churches” development project started by Russian Orthodox Church in cooperation with Moscow government provoked several severe conflicts in the city.
The film focuses on a story of Torfyanka, a small park where contention between the believers and park defenders has turned into a severe struggle with night watches, physicalfights and mutual offence.
FIDBA – Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Buenos Aires
FIDBA is biggest Documentary Film Festival of Iberoamerica, and the first International Documentary Film Festival in Argentina, space where cinema of the real, films with the same vocation, dialogue with one another and address the diversity of forms and particular tasks that take reality as material. From this premise, the FIDBA is planned as an annual event in which they will present a selection of new directors, revisit the films of prominent authors and will recover works and films unknown to mainstream audiences.