"The more your work corresponds to real life, the better it seems..." — these words said by Durer, an artist of the Renaissance, are the most laconic expression of the aesthetic conception of the film festival Flahertiana.

Our festival is dedicated to films which show a character that lives on the screen a part of his life directed by the author according to the laws of dramatic art. The first film of this genre, Nanook from the North, was made by Robert Flaherty in 1922. The film became the aesthetical manifest for the subsequent generations of cinema-makers.

Unlike his colleague from the Soviet Union Dziga Vertov, who at that time experimented a lot with montage, working out the type of screen thinking which we now call clip, Flaherty was focused on a prolonged observation of his characters. The naturalness of a documentary character’s behavior in front of the camera is the main task of the film-director who works in the genre discovered by the American documentary film-maker. Our festival is dedicated to practical and theoretical questions of this genre of the documentary cinema.