“Diamond Butterfly” Eurasian Film Award as the new bright spot of world cinema

 In late November in Moscow, the Open Eurasian Film Diamond Butterfly Award was presented for the first time in history.

Ksenia Muratshina

Beyond the Hollywood blinkers

Asingle mother washes dishes during the day and cars through the night to make ends meet and raise her children, gradually becoming a successful entrepreneur. A man who has lost his job learns to live within his means and takes up a job as a food delivery man. A little boy experiences the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. A couple of elderly St. Petersburg residents support each other for better or worse and live happier lives than their “modern” son and granddaughter. A young man strives to fulfill his mother’s dreams, having learned how much time she has left in this world. Smugglers on the border of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan rescue a girl who escaped from slavery. A Senegalese student decides to speak out against the life-threatening standards of beauty pageants. A Vietnamese squad avoids US surveillance because of an intricate tunnel system. A weaver in a Kyrgyz village creates unique carpets that describe a person’s life. Such stories are not shown in Hollywood, nor are they found in pseudo-popular, artificially hyped series with formulaic plots. Cinema from the non-Western world raises issues every person relates to, defends a civic position, preserves the memory of events defining national identity for a particular society, and sparks truly philosophical debate.

The emergence of the Eurasian Film Academy and Film Awards came in response to the demand for expanding cultural exchange between societies of the non-Western world adhering to traditional human values formed long ago

These storylines were present at the first Open Eurasian Film Diamond Butterfly Award. A total of 34 films from 17 countries were presented. The prize for the best film was eventually awarded to Chinese director Xu Zheng for his film “Against the Current.” Goran Radovanovic (Serbia) was awarded the Best Director Award for the film “The Forest King.” Carol Shore (South Africa) won the Best Screenplay Award for the film “Old Righteous Blues,” Talant Akynbekov (Kyrgyzstan) – Best Cameraman for “Black, Red, Yellow,” Yuri Poteenko (Belarus) – Best Composer for the music in “Dark Castle,” and Meilis Khudaiberenov (Turkmenistan) – Best Artist in the film “Composer.” The prizes for the best male and female roles were awarded to the beloved Russian actors Alexander Adabashian and Svetlana Kryuchkova (“Two People in One Life and a Dog”), and for the best supporting roles – Anvar Kartaev (Uzbekistan) in “Chasing Spring” and Sonia Hussain (Pakistan-Canada) in “Termites.” The biographical drama about the Venezuelan singer and defender of the disadvantaged, Ali Primera, was named the best non-Eurasian film, and Iranian director Majid Majidi was awarded “butterflies” for his contribution to world cinema.

Beyond the political framework

The Diamond Butterfly Film Award is the first major initiative of the Eurasian Academy of Cinematographic Arts. The idea to create the academy itself, as well as a new film competition, was put forward by Nikita Mikhalkov, a star of Russian cinema. The initiative was supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The new structure has grand plans, including developing cultural ties, exchanging experiences between cinematographers from different countries, creating a permanent dialogue platform, and helping those who are just starting their creative path. According to Nikita Mikhalkov, the films awarded the Diamond Butterfly were carefully evaluated in terms of artistic value, and the only restriction on joining the academy and the competition is moral; participants must adhere to consistent work principles, they should sincerely cherish their national, religious, historical, cultural, traditional values and bring these values to the academy with their films.

The competition’s most important feature is its geographical openness. The program is not limited to Eurasian countries and is not tied to any political institutions, international organizations, etc. It included films from the Middle and Far East, Africa, and Latin America. It made for a most unusual and informative cross-section of the modern cultures of the global majority. The first participant reviews have already been published, and in them participants highly appreciated the opportunity to present their work on a serious and unbiased platform, expressed their wishes to expand the geography of the competition and membership in the academy, and were confident that such initiatives are what is needed to preserve the art of cinema and different cultures.

Orchestra performance during the Award

«Any truth without love is a lie»
The emergence of the Eurasian Film Academy and Film Awards came in response to the demand for expanding cultural exchange between societies of the non-Western world adhering to traditional human values formed long ago. The politicization and bias of Western international reviews are becoming more obvious and shocking every year. Sometimes, after reading the press release of some “sensational” film festival (and seeing who won the main awards!), one only wishes for his eyes to forget the disgusting, dirty, unimaginable, and inhuman horror to which they were exposed – a horror showing all the facets of the darkest and ugliest deviations of the human psyche and behavior. Nevertheless, they are elevated by many Western directors and screenwriters to the rank of art. The dirtier, scarier, more shocking, wild and perverted the plot – which simply looks like a documented episode of a mentally ill person (and often clearly violent and dangerous to society) – the more likely the picture is to gain fame from critics who have their noses in the air and obediently repeat the media’s praise. This lack of freedom, typical of the increasingly totalitarian Western society, is hard not to notice.

As a result of this, people all over the world are tired of alien anti-values, anti-culture, anti-art being imposed on them. Instead, they strive to preserve spirituality, morality, and culture; follow their own path and express their thoughts in their own way; and encourage the viewer to develop mentally, reflect on enduring human values, and try to become the best version of themselves. People to not want to dig into crimes, deviations, and their own and other people’s dirty laundry. They also aim to preserve the memory of the events that decided the fate of their peoples. As the Russian bard Oleg Mityaev sang about it in the song “Cinema,” “I did not see war; I only watched the film.” It is the direct duty of cinematographic art – perhaps even more than any other – to bring national memory in its original form to new generations.

The organizers of the Diamond Butterfly have repeatedly stressed that the purpose of the award is to promote the development of national cinematography to draw attention to the importance of cultural characteristics and spirituality in cinematography. For the future, the participants of the Eurasian Film Academy consider it important to be guided by the understanding that the preservation of culture, as Nikita Mikhalkov rightly called it, requires the preservation and protection of those inviolable traditional values that make a person a person with a soul, possessing concepts such as shame, compassion, conscience, love, recognition of their divine origin. The contest’s motto is “Any truth without love is a lie.” Hopefully, in the future, such principles will once again become the norm for cinema globally.

Ksenia Muratshina, Ph.D. (History), Senior Research Fellow, Center for Southeast Asia, Australia, and Oceania Studies, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences