The Soviet Parallel Cinema called then Cine Fantom has been constituted in 1985 around the film magazine of the same name. It brought film producers from Leningrad and Moscow together to form a subcultural underground movement. Till 1987 they projected their films in their own flats as well as in other private flats. The status of underground reinforced the common theme about taboos of the society as well as the situation which made them deal with subcultural non-public subjects such as critique of ideology, violence and homosexuality. The culminating point of this artistic period was to be the first Cine Fantom-Festival in Moscow in 1987.

As a consequence of Glasnost which enables discussions in various publications about themes forbidden in the past these subjects disappeared for the film-makers. Con­sequently they lost their underground identity and they have to take a new course. The festival of Riga (Forum of the non commercial cinema) which for the first time offered a place to producers not organised in institutions was important to this development.

The fusion, now called Parallel Cinema, did not think of itself as a collective superego that is active as a group and that determinates its own themes, it was rather so that each film-maker developed in a very individual way.

A lot has happened since that time. The brothers Igor and Gleb Aleinikov produced at the film academy VGIK of Moscow as well as at the debutant division of the experimental film studios of the national Mosfilm (Somebody was here). While their early works (Cruel Illness Of The Men, Metastasis, Tractor) were characterized by ironic critique on public state of affairs and while their theoretical quarrels dealt with the Soviet cinema of the twenties and of the thirties today they intend to give up this kind of direct influences.

One of their main interests is the relation of the individual and ideology Postpolitical Cinema. The film represents  an exposed piece of Home Art. a style reminding making Super-8 home-movies. Consequently they have removed their holiday at the Baltic around Leningrad and edited them as a montage with sequences from Soviet History.

In many of these earlier films the language is an essential ' part that functions like an insertion and is used asynchronoursly, or in an entangled or a simultaneous way equal to the visual part in order to distract from the signifies. The new works (Somebody Was Here, Mirage) are mostly dealing with “film* aspects. Aesthetics and content, directing narrative constructions and also technical components such as direction of the camera and of the light, composition of the space move into the center of the work. The Aleinikov . brothers turn explicitly away from postmodern arbitrarian  style and try to use genuine (Soviet?) style in working out a film of the nineties.

The video producer Boris Juchananov works completely different. His video films do not deny the fact that he has been assistant producer for a theatre. He works with several Moscow theatre groups and apart from his video work he sets up ballets. The associative improvisation in the company is part of his film concept, every sequence is developed collectively and transposed into film whereby staging and documentation are linked together. In this way his work gains on reflection that refers to the origin of the situation and to the acting together of the actors and the camera.

His video theory (on which he is writing at the moment) contains an extremely wide gathering of material (“matrix") which he assembles individually for special presentations and for video copies (“variation"). No copy is like the others.

A video philosophy is attached to it and regards that medium as linear and not discret. The temporal aspect, the length, are more important than the editing and the structural composition. At the moment Boris Juchananov is head directry at the Free University of Leningradwmch he helped to found other directors of the Parallel Cinema such as the necrorealists from Leningrad cannot be included here or in the programme of the festival. However we would like to call attention to the 3rd Festival of the Parallel Cinema taking place in 1991.