“The Swan Song of Fedor Ozerov” wins the price of our reader jury

In it, the 25-year-old guitarist and songwriter Fedor (Viachslau Kmit) meets the rumors of an impending nuclear war with the project to found a band. He also wants to write a good song.

For this, however, he needs his lucky sweater, a thick colorful wool sweater with embroidered daisies. He hopes for the necessary creative thrust from the garment. Unfortunately, the sweater has disappeared. So Fedor goes to an odyssey, contrary to the general panic before the Third World War II, which was prophesied at the turn of the year, remains calm during his sometimes grotesque detective work.

Art helps to endure the unbearable

The film, which is as short and entertaining with 78 minutes, also makes bonds in the Orpheus and Eurydike myth, in orcs and elven stories. He shows “in a sensitive way the (in) possible handling of current lack of perspective,” says the jury’s reason. “He convinces with his original design and humorous dialogues.” “The Swan Song” is the “intoxicating feature film debut of a Belarusian director and an ensemble of immigrants in exile in Poland”, according to the seven.

What can the art of reality oppose? The fact that the young filmmaker and studied engineer Yuri Semashko, born in 1993, asked the question with special urgency, certainly has to do with the fact that, like many other artists and intellectuals, he had to emigrate from Belarus.

“What do we do when the world gets out of joint, romp around, dictators are in power and we are flooded by bad news every day? Right – we do art, ”he writes in his statement about the film.

Semashko lives in Warsaw today. There he realized his feature film debut, a Lithuanian-German Super Lowbudget production, together with other young emigrants: inside from Belarus. At the award ceremony on Saturday in the Hyatt Conference Hall, the Berlin co-producers Marc-Daniel Dinand and Christian Riegel took the award-Semashko had left a few days ago. Dinand thanked his name and recalled that everyone who offers the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko forehead and support.

The jury has “broadly discussed” every film, says juror Julian Gabrysch, who works as a doctor in the Charité, if not the Berlinale. They paid attention to the visual composition, sound, soundtrack and pace. In the end, they also decided on the film of a self -taught, because he has more difficult to get attention to.

“Films with greater funding that also appeal to a wider audience may have less necessary,” says juror Katja Horstmann. When she read the program text for “The Swan Song …” in advance, she initially thought that he would certainly not. But then her Semashkos Potpourri made of funny and melancholic scenes.

She also felt a little reminded of her professional past as a tourist on cruise ships. During the landing in Russian provincial cities, Horstmann sometimes danced to his own songs in small discos.

Theresa Wiesweg, who completed her film and literature studies last summer, almost feared the time after the Berlinale. “Let’s see how it will not always dive into the Berlinale cosmos.” She found the cinema marathon very enriching, also because of the insight behind the scenes of the program cinema.