Author: VK
On January 21 at the Central House of Journalists a creative event called "Echo of the Kunaki Festival" has opened. The Kunaki Festival, which has been taking place in Sochi for 6 years, provides an opportunity to show films designed to destroy stereotypes of the Caucasus region. The sixth festival, held from 1 to 6 November 2012, was attended by over 70 journalists and documentary film makers from all over the North Caucasus, the Krasnodar and Stavropol Territories, the Rostov region, Adygea, Moscow and Abkhazia, Belarus and Ukraine. "Echo of the Kunaki Festival" is intended to help audiences see the unknown Caucasus. For five days in the Central House of Journalists 22 films will be displayed, and round tables and meetings with famous people will be held. The organizers are confident that this movie is a powerful resource for the rehabilitation of cultural and spiritual space.
“The films of the Caucasus, the movies by Caucasian authors, somehow pass the large TV channels by. I hope that this festival will cause interest in Caucasian films, movies of the Caucasus, and for sure it will have a continuation”, Aliy Totorkulov, chairman of RKNK, says.
“I am from Adygea, and my husband is an Ossetian. I lived in Kabardino-Balkaria, so the whole Caucasus has marked me”, Sulieta Kusova, president of the Kunaki Festival, says. “And when I moved here, to Moscow, and established with my colleagues the Center for Ethnic and Religious Issues of the Media, I led the center, and one of the organizations founding my center was the Russian Union of Journalists. And we started engaging in analyzing Caucasophobia and Islamophobia in the media, which had just emerged. They emerged very clearly, somewhere in the gap between Nord-Ost and Beslan, those two terrible terrorist attacks, and it opened up a debate in society about the Caucasus, malicious or not, in Russian statehood. I wrote a book "Russia Between Nord-Ost and Beslan" in which I analyzed these phobias. From this expert analytical work with my colleagues, journalists from the North Caucasus in Moscow, we decided to move to some constructive projects. Then there could be some real business. In fact, actually faith without works is dead.
And then there was the desire to create a Caucasian analytical club, and on the basis of the Union of journalists we met in Sochi, Dagomys, where the media festival "All Russia" was held, and 2500 journalists attended this festival. And our Caucasian club always had success, because we were discussing some real issues, we sang, our artists visited our club performing and showing our culture and art, and so we formed a common space. And now for six years this festival has been registered in Lazarevskoye, and for six years now we have been creating a real media space”.
"Kunaki" is more than friendship, kinship, love, etc. I would use a synonym by Okudzhava - "Join hands, my friends, in order not to be divided one by one". And no matter what your nationality and faith are, because we are engaged in problems of Russia today. Savagery of manners is a universal problem. The decline of education and culture is universal. And finally, the young generation, which is formed now in a completely different environment, and the connection of generations should not be destroyed, because we have this fading role of the board of elders, the role of the elders in general. These and many other problems which have become topics of films that journalists make from all over the south of Russia, from Belarus, from Yerevan, from Georgia. In addition to movies, we, of course, hold round table discussions, brainstorming sessions, we visit each other's homes. Because we're not only from the North Caucasus - there are also Stavropol, Krasnodar, that is, the south of Russia, Azov, Kalmykia, Nogai, Astrakhan, so we cover all the south of Russia. I, as a President of the festival, feel like the minister of nationalities of southern Russia. We want this experience to be used in the whole space of our country. Finally, the federal media, the federal center should become interested in our very complex, yes, sometimes wild, yes, sometimes unruly, rebellious, but very intelligent, very wise and very decent region called the North Caucasus”.
