Mikhail Basov. Visual artist and filmmaker. His video works have been exhibited internationally at festivals and gallery exhibitions such as the Jihlava International Documentary FF, MIEFF, the Japan Media Arts Festival, the WRO Media Art Biennale, Kasseler Dokfest, Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Videoformes, Kinodot, DOKer Shorts, and the Message to Man International Film Festival, among others. He was a jury member for the In Silico competition at the 2020 edition of Message to Man.
Commentaries
About his retrospective at the "Message to man" 2025 festival Mikhail Bassov wrote (translated by kinoglaz.fr):
"My odyssey in the art of moving images has now lasted 20 years, and my filmography currently includes 17 works. In the "Message to Man" retrospective, I presented six short films made between 2012 and 2021, as well as a brand new feature film, the material for which I have gradually accumulated over these 20 years.
My work always follows a rule: I must encounter a random event in everyday life, and then my imagination begins to exploit it. This event is subtle, on the periphery of vision, "out of (auto)focus," but always authentic. I do not use AI-generated images (although I am not fundamentally opposed to them, as long as the creators are careful to enclose them in quotation marks or brackets) and strive to use only the simplest digital effects. I strive not to reduce, but to increase "manual" work, and more generally to reduce Automation to the bare minimum. Ultimately, my goal is to seize opportunities where real-world "dice rolls" and unexpected encounters become the pillars of cinematic organisms.
A few words about the films. Free Movements [2013], Film for Imaginary Music [2014], and Plastic Bottle stair dance [2018] are a black-and-white trilogy where the movement and "animation" of objects are linked to the wind. Out of Autofocus [2016] and La Bagatelle [2021] emphasize the presence of the camera itself as a device and as a "point of view," a gaze that is both external and internal. Water plays an important role in these works. In Short Circuits [2020], everything rests on the montage, chains of associations and "materializing metaphors." Here we are dealing with the unifying force of electric fire. The feature film The Spot of Time [2025] is a vast, labyrinthine cinematic poem, where the viewer finds himself in a "tidal zone" between reality and fantasy, life and cinema." Mikhail Basov
