One of the most radical and prolific filmmakers to emerge this decade, at 23 years old Vadim Kostrov entered the international film circuit with six feature films within a single year, all made in his hometown of Nizhny Tagil in the Urals. These works premiered at eminent festivals including Doclisboa and FIDMarseille, with a retrospective presented at FICUNAM in Mexico City, and “Summer” (2021) receiving a Special Jury Mention at Sheffield Doc. Produced outside institutional frameworks, Kostrov’s films fuse direct cinema and observational nonfiction into meditations on time, light, and landscape – both internal and external. His cinema is one of presence and emotional saturation, where attention itself becomes a form of experience. Since fleeing Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, Kostrov has lived in exile, first in Istanbul and now in France, where displacement and memory have taken on new prominence in his work. His recent exile films – post-diary impressions seeking within abstraction – have screened at Doc Films Chicago as part of the year-long retrospective Manifested Time: Vadim Kostrov, in a focus program at Ecrã Brazil, and at TIFF (In Transit).