Beat Film Festival

The Beat Film Festival is one of the largest documentary film festivals in Russia. Held every summer, it focuses on documentaries about contemporary culture. The festival offers a balanced program that includes both well-known films that have premiered at major international film festivals and small-budget independent works.

The Beat Film Festival was founded in 2010 by Kirill Sorokin and Alyona Bocharova as an independent cultural project dedicated to music documentaries. Since then, it has grown to become a major cultural event that strives to introduce wide audiences to high-profile documentaries about current events from the world of music, contemporary art, media, street culture, sports, and new technologies. The festival’s mission is to create a cultural agenda for the residents of Moscow and other Russian cities, as well as to promote documentaries as a new pastime.

The Beat Film Festival screens dozens of documentaries, including Russian premiers of critically acclaimed documentary films, and draws thousands of attendees every year. The program of the festival is divided into several sections such as Grrrl Power, Art: Prices and Values, Music, Virtual Reality, Brandbeat, Sport, Special Screenings, and more.

Film screenings take place at major venues of the Russian capital, most of which are located within walking distance or a short metro ride from each other. Alongside screenings, the program includes joint programs with curators and cultural institutions, meetings with filmmakers, discussions, parties, and a national film competition aimed to promote emerging Russian filmmakers.

Along with the flagship event, the Beat Film Festival team runs a regional version of the festival named Beat Weekend. It showcases five most important and warmly received films from the festival program that are screened in 15 large cities, from Saint Petersburg to Vladivostok, in October. The main goal of Beat Weekend is to give viewers from all over the country an opportunity to watch new documentaries about modern cultural phenomena and heroes who they can relate to.

Another project run by the festival team is Beat Films. It is a creative agency focused on contemporary documentary cinema whose main goal is to open new territories for screening documentaries in Russia, as well as to promote documentary cinema through collaborations with cultural and commercial partners.