ИСТОРИЯ МОСКОВСКОГО МЕЖДУНАРОДНОГО ФЕСТИВАЛЯ ВИЗУАЛЬНОЙ АНТРОПОЛОГИИ

Abstract

The Ninth International FestivalBiennale “Mediating Camera” was held in Moscow in May 2021. This is the first Russian festival organized on the principles of visual anthropology and still adhering to that vision. The present article reports on the festival, the history of its establishment and development, and the changes it endured in the first twenty years since the turn of the millennium. The introduction briefly discusses visual anthropology and its situation in the USSR on the eve of Perestroika. The next section describes the first Russian documentary film festivals with similar angles. Further in the article, the authors discuss the approaches and principles adopted by the festival’s creators, a volunteer group of Moscow State University’s Center for Visual Anthropology. The main focus of attention is the initial period of the festival’s formation, when the organizers’ approaches to organizing the festival first took shape.