Beat Film Festival

Beat Film Festival is an international documentary festival with a focus on music and modern culture that takes place annually in May and has a regional showcase in 15 cities — called Beat Weekend — that runs in November. It is currently one of the largest documentary festivals in Russia, with 20.000 attendance in Moscow and another 10,000 in regions.
Its program is a vibrant mix of screenings and special events, parties and discussions that is aimed to set both comprehensive and cutting edge cultural agenda for several generations of local youth.

Beat Film Festival was founded in 2010 as an independent cultural initiative that united music and film in one exciting program of music documentaries, dj-sets, parties and talks. By 2016 the Beat Film Festival has grown to be one of the largest international documentary festivals in Russia that sets an agenda across all cultural fields, be it social thought or sports, street culture or fashion. In it was attended by almost 20.000 people. Among its gusts have been Adam Curtis (UK), Placebo band (UK), the SXSW founder Louis Black, late New York Times journalist David Carr, etc. In 2012 the festival started traveling across the country and now has a strong regional extension — Beat Weekend festival that happens simultaneously over one weekend in November and gathers over 10.000 attendees. Beat Weekend serves as a model of alternative distribution for certain films. Beat Film Festival also has a distribution arm for documentaries.