Moscow Film Festival Kicks off With the World Premiere of Transformers

The world premiere of Transformers: Dark of the Moon opened the 33rd Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) last night at the Pushkinsky Theater, Russia’s main film venue. Several stars of the film walked MIFF’s red carpet (which was green this year) for the premiere, including Shia LaBeouf, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Josh Duhamel, Patrick Dempsey, John Malkovich (who received a lifetime achievement award at the opening ceremony) and Tyrese Gibson, as well as director Michael Bay and producers Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Ian Bryce.

Paramount execs Brad Grey, Rob Moore, Adam Goodman, Randy Spendlove, Marc Evans, and Megan Colligan also attended the premiere.

“When a large Hollywood company offers us to have a world premiere of its film, we cannot reject it,” Nikita Mikhalkov, renowned film director and the festival’s president, said at the opening ceremony. “We hope that events like that would help to improve the situation in our film industry.”

As a part of premier, the concert show by American alternative band Linkin Park, which wrote Transformer’s soundtrack, was held the same night at Vasilievsky Spusk, just outside the Kremlin.

Meanwhile, more than 400 films are to be screened at the festival. Seventeen films (two of them Russian) are to compete for the festival’s main award, the Golden St George. The board of judges, headed by Charlie Chaplin’s daughter Geraldine Chaplin, is to announce the winners at the closing ceremony on July 2.

Two industry events, the Film Finance Forum Moscow 2011 and the 3rd Moscow Co-Production Forum, are to be held as part of the festival.

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