IT’S always intriguing to see how cinema acts as a barometer of the times and perhaps not surprising that two of the most awaited films among the 16 in competition at the Moscow International Film Festival were Russian.

Vladimir Turmayev’s White Yegel, set in the the icy, treeless wastes of the tundra, tells the story of Aloshka. He’s a young man of the Nenets people, an ethnic minority in Siberia. 

He lives with his mother and, despite his love for his ex-girlfriend who left their homeland to study, he is forced by his parent to marry. Yet every day Alyoshka checks the road, hopelessly waiting for his love to return. 

Such moments are typical of this emotionally charged film. There’s little dialogue but the characters provide it with a beating heart as the story of identity and belonging unfolds. It is too a meditation on nature, mortality and living in isolation and, in the tradition of Soviet and Russian cinema, it has an extraordinary, mesmerising beauty.

The other Russian film, Valeria Gai  Germanika’s Yes And Yes, is a real discovery. Germanika’s second feature, it tells the story of a young teacher who has a passionate love affair with a young artist which changes her life forever.

Brilliantly put together, it’s an unsentimental and provocative exploration of the struggles to produce art both at the personal level and in a society which ignores the artist. But it is also about the challenges facing young people  abandoned and marginalised by the system.

Yes And Yes didn’t carry off the best film award — that went to Azuyoshi Kumakiri’s My Man, the story of a man who becomes romantically involved with his adopted daughter — yet it did secure the best director prize. Hopefully, it won’t fall foul of the new law that’s just been introduced in Russia outlawing swearing in films. 

Recently, two films have been blacklisted in that country — Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan and Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is The Warmest Colour and director Sergei Loznista has been denied entry to Russia because of his latest documentary about the Ukrainian protests. 

In this climate, the festival’s president Nikita Mikhalkov took a courageous stand at the closing ceremony when he expressed his solidarity with the filmmakers who couldn’t attend for political reasons and his support for the freedom of expression in Russia.