"Faces of Love" Festival in Moscow

The 8th festival called Faces of Love, the only of its kind, opens in the Russian capital on Monday. The event, which runs until January 23rd, will feature 19 films from more than 15 countries, including the USA, France, Germany, South Korea, Israel, the Netherlands, China, Austria, etc. Russia will present Vera Storozheva's "Sky. Plane. Girl," a remake of the once tremendously popular movie "About Love Again," which was based on a play by Eduard Radzinsky. The original starred Tatiana Doronina; the central part in the new movie is played by Renata Litvinova.

"This time, the competitive program was put together easily and quickly," said Sergei Lavrentyev, the director of the festival's film programs. "We got everything we asked for, undoubtedly due to the festival's status and prestige." As Lavrentyev explained, The Faces of Love is a festival which must not necessarily feature movies that never appeared in any other contest. Thanks to this fact, Muscovites will have a chance to see some of the world's most sensational new movies, such as Iceland's "The Laugh of a Seagull," which won recognition at a festival in Karlovy Vary, and "Music for Weddings and Funerals," the most famous Norwegian film of the season.

Apart from the competition program, the program envisages two retrospectives, called "Ah, What a Man He Was!" and "Ah, What a Woman!" These will feature good old love stories and an opportunity to recall the times when love stories were unhurried, when men were romantic and women were bewitching. Cinemagoers attending the retrospectives will have a chance to watch movies starring their old idols-Greta Garbo, Brigitte Bardot, Romy Schneider, Sophia Loren, Gerard Philippe, Alain Delon, Oleg Strizhenov, and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

The festival, which is being staged in the Moscow House of Cinema, opens today with a French-British film "Jet Lag," which stars Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno.