MOSCOW (Russian Film Business Today) – The 19th Kinotavr Open Russian Film Festival will take place from June 7–15 in sunny Sochi. The main competition program includes films made in 2007–2008 that have not participate in other Russian film festival and have not premiered on television.

At present, eight films have been confirmed – Kirill Serebrennikov’s St. George’s Day, Igor Voloshin’s Nirvana, Bakur Bakuradze’s Shultes (which is also included in the Directors’ Week at the 61st Cannes Film Festival), Sergei Mokritsky’s The Four Ages of Love, Alexander Melnik’s New Land, Guka Omarova’s Baksy and Alexander Proshkin’s Live and Remember, which will be the festival’s opening film.

Kinotavr’s selection committee, which includes the festival’s programming director Sitora Aliyeva, as well as film critics Irina Lyubarskaya, Alyona Solntseva and Yevgeny Gusyatinsky, continues to work.

It is now known that the main competition jury will be headed up by Pavel Chukhrai and will include producer Roman Borisevich and writer-director Marina Razbezhkina. The names of the other jury members are being kept under wraps for the moment.

This year’s festival will award an award “For Excellence in Cinematography.” In addition, as is customary, the main competition will award the main prize and the regular awards for best directing, first film, actor, actress, as well as the Grigory Gorin Prize for the best screenplay and Mikael Tariverdiev Prize for best music.

The jury for the Kinotavr Korotky Metr short film competition includes director Anna Melikyan, producer Natalya Mokritskaya and film critic Leonid Pavlyuchik.

The Kinotavr also features the non-competitive programs Summer Euphoria, Cinema on the Square, Anthology of Russian Film, Cinema That We Overlooked, etc.

The festival’s closing film will be Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light, which captured the Stones in performance at New York’s Beacon Theater in the autumn of 2006.

The official Kinotavr press conference, where all of the competition program’s participants and jury members will be announced, will take place on May 12 in the National Hotel in Moscow.