In an interview with RIA Novosti, he said signs of this could now be seen not just at international festivals, where Russian-made movies increasingly find themselves in the spotlight of both public and critical attention, but also at special screenings organized to showcase Russian film to foreign audiences.
Mosfilm Studios, where Shakhnazarov is chief executive, is one of the organizations involved with arranging such showings across the world. In the past six months, it has organized Russian film weeks in countries such as Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Chile, and China. All the films in the program showed to packed houses, and in many cases, the unexpectedly high demand made the organizers extend the screening period well beyond one week.
Shakhnazarov said foreign distributors and producers, too, were displaying growing demand for Russian movies, but admitted that this realm still remained largely untapped.
"We have difficulty in promoting [our] pictures abroad, marketing them, and we're running too few joint projects," he said, adding that foreign filmmakers tended to take a more proactive approach and showed more readiness to collaborate. However, Shakhnazarov said these problems were not insurmountable, and the important thing was that the world had finally begun to take notice of Russian movies. "We must not disappoint foreign viewers and our counterparts abroad, falling short of their expectations," he said.
Shakhnazarov has just returned from two international film festivals. A festival in Jerusalem awarded him a prize for professional achievement and a forum on the Italian island of Ischia recognized his contribution to the global motion picture arts.
