VOKA CINEMA launching a film club called Artformat

The VOKA video streaming service and the Silver Screen cinema chain are launching an Artformat film club. The first event on November 3 will feature a documentary called Yura the Musician by Pavel Selin about Yuri Shevchuk, the one and only front man of the rock band DDT.

The mission of the Artformat project is to give indie film lovers a chance to get together and watch festival hits in the original, discuss these films and meet those who created them. VOKA CINEMA and Silver Screen will become the venues for these events. The screenings will have directors or filming crew in attendance as well as experts on the topics covered in the films.

The first film to be discussed at Artformat will be the 2018's film Yura the Musician. It was called the most large-scale documentary about a legend of the Russian rock music—Yuri Shevchuk, the founder and all-time bandleader of DDT. The filming crew accompanied the musician for 11 years to capture backstage, working on albums, rehearsals, and performances in front of many-thousand audiences in dozens of cities.

"Over these years, the filming discontinued several times only to start again against all odds. Why did I keep at it? Because I view Shevchuk as a tuning fork of reality. He opens up to life in all of its aspects and puts his thoughts into words like no one else. And this film is an attempt to see through the character's eyes how Russia, Shevchuk's poetry and personality, his music, and the band DDT have changed over 11 years," says the writer and director Pavel Selin.

This Russian journalist is renowned for NTV channel's projects Programma Maximum, Namedni, Poslednee Slovo, and others. He will present his film in person.

The film Yura the Musician will be shown at 7 p.m. on November 3 at VOKA CINEMA (11 Peter Mstislavets Street).