Telling Stories Festival to Spotlight Current Global Media Trends

On May 17 and 18, the annual Telling Stories festival, organized by the Faculty of Communications, Media and Design, will take place in Moscow. Festival guests will be able to attend a public talk with a Hollywood director, learn how to create their own successful micromedia, see a theater performance by HSE students and much more. Entry to all of the festival events is free.

This year, Telling Stories will be held at Digital Business Space with the support of the Moscow Agency of Innovation. The festival events fall into five categories – cinema, media, communications, design, and art. Each area will feature a foreign headliner and Russian experts.

The main headliner of the festival will be Jonas Kjellberg, co-founder of Skype, founder of Player: IO, investor, and MBA programme instructor at Stanford University and the Stockholm School of Economics. In his presentation, ‘Social and Creative Innovations: New Business Models for a New Generation,’ he will discuss why some ideas can turn into an international business, while others cannot.

 Alik Sakharov, the American director and cameraman who worked on TV series such as The Sopranos, Dexter, House of Cards and Game of Thrones, will headline the Cinema events. Partnering with the festival’s Cinema category this year is Moskino, which will hold a series of presentations by film industry professionals and a programme of fashion and design films (including Kusama: Infinite Worlds, McQueen, and 100 Years of Design).

 The Media events will be headlined by Oobah Butler, the most famous pranker-journalist in the UK, who will talk about current trends in global media. Namgay Zam, an independent journalist, will headline the Communication events and talk about what it is like to live in a country where the GDP has been replaced by a happiness index. The headliner of the Design events will be Michel Bouvet – a French poster artist and professor of visual culture at ESAG Penninghen.

 The Art events category will comprise several talks, including ‘The Universal Person: Artists and Commercial Industries’; ‘Curate This: New Сultural Leaders Beyond the Museum’; ‘The Contemporary Concept of Theatrical Space: Design as a Mediation Between Director and Audience’; and ‘Make Yourself at Home: The Russian Art Residence Experience’. 

The festival will also present a new VR project of the artist Dmitry Vrubel and works by students of the School of Design (including an exhibition of graduation works in the genre of public art, a theatrical performance by students of the ‘Artist of Theater and Cinema’ course, led by Golden Mask Award winner Anastasia Nefedova, and a fashion show by students of the programme ‘Fashion’ H.A.R.D. 005).

In addition to foreign speakers, the festival’s lecturers will include experts and professionals of the media industry — HSE professors Dmitry Kotov, Oleg Pashenko, Anastasia Nefedova, Dmitry Shelukhin, co-founder and general director of the creative agency Red keds Vitaly Bykov, co-founder and creative producer of Zebra Hero Artem Tsaregorodtsev, Olga Kroytor, director and singer Daria Charusha, screenwriter Nikolay Kulikov (Bitter!, Legend No. 17, I'm Losing Weight, Crew, and Moving Up), Moscow historian, publicist, and author of the telegram-channel ‘Architectural Outsourcing’ Pavel Gnilyorybov, and many others.

‘Communication is the meaning of human life, and the meaning of communication is the ability to tell a story — to put life into words and signs,’ says Andrey Bystritskiy, dean of HSE’s Faculty of Communications, Media, and Design. ‘In the 21st century, this becomes much more interesting and more complicated, because we live in an age of new communication outlets. It is full of new, exceptional opportunities, but it requires equally exceptional talents and abilities—which are what we aim to develop at this festival and in our faculty.’

To attend the festival, you must register by selecting the desired day (May 17 and 18) or the specific event. Seats are limited.

Follow festival updates on the official website and social media.

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