Abastan Cinema Club

— Actually, I had organized some screenings before together with other people, just less regularly. Back then I didn’t have a projector, and there wasn’t a dedicated screening space at the factory. I remember watching films outdoors on a bedsheet stretched across the yard, accompanied by the sound of crickets. It was aesthetically beautiful, of course, but far from ideal in terms of image quality and concentration on the film itself.

After we moved out of the factory, I rented an apartment and noticed a huge empty wall in the living room, decorated with foam-plastic relief ornaments. I quickly realized that something had to be done about it, otherwise it would drive me crazy. That’s how the screen appeared, and for the last two years it has been the place where we’ve been watching films in Tumanyan.

— At the very least, it’s always a good excuse to get together and catch up on local news — we do live in a small town, after all.

As for cinema itself, everyone brings their own background and perspective, so people often notice different things in the same film. Discussions help us discover aspects we might have missed on our own.

There’s also another factor, although I’m not sure how strongly it applies here: immersion. Watching a film in a movie theater with a large screen and good sound is usually a better experience than watching it at home, even with a projector and decent speakers. And if you’re watching alone on a laptop, it’s much easier to get distracted by everything happening around you.

— In reality, we watched many different films, but it’s true that Iranian cinema played a major role in the summer of 2024.

That July I returned from the Golden Apricot Film Festival, where Jafar Panahi unexpectedly appeared after leaving Iran for the first time in many years. Perhaps that influenced my choices. I also hadn’t explored Iranian cinema very deeply before, and most of the films we screened that summer were first-time watches for me as well.

Only occasionally do I show and revisit recent films that made a particularly strong impression on me and that I feel compelled to share with others.

I first heard about Roman Mikhailov as a filmmaker through one of the film club chats, and he immediately fascinated me: a mathematician and researcher interested in gambling, who lived and taught in India, speaks Hindi, and makes fairy-tale-like Russian films with a strange, hypnotic cinematic language.

What surprises me, by the way, is that his films have barely appeared at international festivals. Either he’s not interested in that circuit, or his work is simply too underground to attract much attention. Personally, I genuinely enjoy his films, even though they can be quite insane—especially if you’re familiar with his books.

— My introduction to cinema as an art form actually happened fairly late in life. I only started watching films regularly and seriously during the COVID years. Before that, my viewing habits were mostly limited to mainstream movies and TV series.

I remember that it wasn’t until 2018 that I first watched Pulp Fiction. I was sitting on the roof of my house in Varkala, India. My friend Kostya had come to visit. He was already traveling to various film festivals back then and started introducing me to more unusual cinema.

I can’t say there was one exact moment when everything suddenly clicked, but Pulp Fiction has definitely remained one of my favorite films ever since.

— My introduction to cinema as an art form actually happened fairly late in life. I only started watching films regularly and seriously during the COVID years. Before that, my viewing habits were mostly limited to mainstream movies and TV series.

I remember that it wasn’t until 2018 that I first watched Pulp Fiction. I was sitting on the roof of my house in Varkala, India. My friend Kostya had come to visit. He was already traveling to various film festivals back then and started introducing me to more unusual cinema.

I can’t say there was one exact moment when everything suddenly clicked, but Pulp Fiction has definitely remained one of my favorite films ever since.

— My introduction to cinema as an art form actually happened fairly late in life. I only started watching films regularly and seriously during the COVID years. Before that, my viewing habits were mostly limited to mainstream movies and TV series.

I remember that it wasn’t until 2018 that I first watched Pulp Fiction. I was sitting on the roof of my house in Varkala, India. My friend Kostya had come to visit. He was already traveling to various film festivals back then and started introducing me to more unusual cinema.

I can’t say there was one exact moment when everything suddenly clicked, but Pulp Fiction has definitely remained one of my favorite films ever since.

— I already started that list in the previous answer. Tarantino would certainly be among my favorites, although not all of his films work equally well for me.

I would also definitely include Stanley Kubrick. That may sound somewhat stereotypical for someone who is into cinema, but the films of his that I’ve seen made a strong impression on me from the very first viewing: Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Full Metal Jacket.

Very recently, as part of our Tumanyan screenings, we watched Elem Klimov’s Come and See. In my opinion, it’s one of the greatest films ever made about war.

More generally, Soviet cinema is paradoxically remarkable despite the limitations imposed by censorship. I’m very fond of Otar Iosseliani (There Once Was a Singing Blackbird), Georgiy Daneliya (Mimino), and of course Andrei Tarkovsky (Stalker).

A retrospective screening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet at the most recent festival affected me so strongly that I found myself humming its song for weeks afterward.

As for recent cinema, the film that impressed me most this year was Resurrection by the Chinese director Bi Gan. It’s an overwhelming experience even for seasoned cinephiles—what English speakers might call a “mindfuck”—yet at the same time it is astonishingly beautiful.

— I started attending film festivals actively after emigrating. It was important for me to find new points of reference, new interests, and connections with the places where I was living.

Before leaving Russia, I managed to visit the Window to Europe Film Festival in Vyborg.

In 2022, I attended the Golden Apricot Film Festival in Yerevan for the first time. Back then I only saw a couple of screenings. As for the most recent edition in 2025, a friend and I even ended up writing an article about it in both Russian and English—a good illustration of how much things have changed over three years.

I really like the Yerevan festival. It has a calm, welcoming atmosphere and feels remarkably egalitarian. During breaks between screenings, you can casually meet and talk with people who were literally competing for or winning awards at Cannes just days earlier.

Since then, I’ve attended several festivals in India, and the experience there is completely different: huge crowds, insane lines for major premieres, slightly shorter lines for everything else, far more screenings, and many more venues.

That naturally raises the question: why travel all the way to India for a film festival?

The accreditation fee is only about 1,200 rupees (roughly $15), and it includes access to four films per day. For very little money, you can watch nearly everything that made waves at major festivals during the year, plus a number of new and lesser-known films.

— There are several highly acclaimed festival films that I missed for various reasons and still want to see.

I also have ideas for retrospectives that I’ve been postponing for years. One example is Béla Tarr’s Satantango, which feels particularly appropriate after his passing earlier this year.

And of course, I have the same problem as every film lover: an endless watchlist that will never be completed. Every day, more films are released than I can possibly keep up with.

So I suspect there will always be more plans than available dates in the screening calendar.