Chto Delat

Museum Songspiel: The Netherlands 20XX tells the story of a group of immigrants fleeing deportation. The film follows the immigrants struggle as they seek refuge in the museum, under the assumption that it is the last bastion of free speech and support for the politically oppressed. When the refugees are discovered a cogent, stimulating conversation develops between the director of the museum, the curator, the artist, a TV reporter and the museum attendants

A group of strangely costumed heroes set out on a journey to find a miracle in this absurdist lo-fi musical roadmovie by the politically engaged art collective Chto Delat. Their experimental flashmob, staged in the former German mining town of Hettstedt, channels the political anxieties of our times.

This film was inspired by the editing, audio and narrative techniques used by Jean-Luc Godard in his film British Sounds (1969). Our film is an attempt to find out whether the spirit (if not the letter) of Godard’s experiments could be transferred to the suffocating reality of Russia on the eve of the 2011-2012 parliamentary and presidential elections. Godard’s film was released during a boisterous, revolutionary period in British politics and society. It was a manifesto for a new agitational cinema capable of describing the totality of social transformations in their dialectical emergence. Are we capable, in the midst of profound political and social reaction, of critically sharing Godard’s vision and aesthetics?

Chto Delat is an artist collective, founded in 2003 in St. Pertersburg, RUS, and composed of Tsaplya Olga Egorova, Artiom Magun, Nikolay Oleynikov, Natalia Pershina / Glucklya, Alexey Penzin, Alexander Skidan, Oxana Timofeeva, Dmitry Vilensky and Nina Gasteva