Igor Soukmanov has joined the Odesa International Film Festival team. He is a famous film expert and Ex-Program Director of the Minsk International Film Festival "Listapad". Igor became an Advisory Board Member of programming. The whole team at filmfestivals.com wishes our friend best of luck and much fun in his new role.

Igor Soukmanov is a well-known Belarussian film expert and journalist. He is a member of the European Film Academy, a vice-president of the Byelorussian section of International Federation of Film Critics, (FIPRESCI). Igor Soukmanov is a Commander of the French Order of the Arts and the Letters. Also, he is a permanent writer of a film magazine Iskusstvo Kino (Film Art), the earliest magazine in Europe, which specializes on film studies.

“It is such a pleasure, responsibility and honor for me to be a part of the Odesa International Film Festival team – a celebration of cinema, engulfed in sunshine, seafaring, urban hospitality, gourmandise and irony. For many years I have been a guest of the OIFF. I would immerse myself in its wonderful hustle and bustle, meet friends and colleagues, and watch as year after year the national industry builds muscle mass… Now, carefully going through these impressions in my memory, being “in the middle of the action", I gladly pick up the program relay, relying in my work on the important commandment "do no harm, but multiply”, Igor Soukmanov noted. - “The public's trust in the festival must be backed up by results. Our films will be audience-friendly, but at the same time they will set the bar for taste, serving not just as a "cure of boredom", but as a small revolution of consciousness. It is very important that these films provide food for thought, disturb and capture with their unique authorial intonation. They have to be true and infinitely human. So that every OIFF viewer would like to talk passionately and think only about these films in the Odesa evenings”.

The13th Odesa International Film Festival is scheduled to take place from 23 to 30 July, 2022.