Beat Weekend, Oct. 3-7, is a local documentary festival of contemporary culture and music that features six films from the Beat Film Festival held earlier this year. It will take place in 15 major Russian cities from Moscow to Vladivostok this week.
The program features artists from singer M.I.A. to electronic band Depeche Mode and independent hip-hop stars from Nas to Pusha T along with a series of talks with invited experts and parties thematically related to the films.
Here are our beat week picks.
“Skate Kitchen”
“Everybody should see this movie,” Eve MacSweeny, the director of “Vogue,” wrote. The “Guardian’s” Peter Bradshaw wrote that it was “an intensely likable and sympathetic movie, with its seductively laid-back documentary realist style.” Crystal Moselle´s film reclaims the skater genre from movies Larry Clark’s “The Smell of Us” and Gus Van Sant’s “Paranoid Park,” which fetishized the skaters, their perceived alienation and lack of affect – and, of course, their maleness. This is about a women’s skater group called Skate Kitchen who share their stunts and general freewheeling and life-affirming attitude on Instagram.