Beart and Films for All at Moscow Film Festival

The Moscow Film Festival is a chance to taste a hundred different flavors of film. Including the competition, there are 27 different programs of films on during the festival — old, new, good, bad, tasteful, in-your-face, even North Korean — a variety so vast that even the fussiest of moviegoers can find something to watch.

Nineteen movies will fight it out in the competition, where French director Luc Besson is head of the jury. But with almost no big names, all eyes — and almost certainly those of one organizer — will be on French actress Emmanuelle Beart, who is expected to come for the premiere of her controversial film “It Begins With the End,” which was reportedly turned away from the Cannes Film Festival because of its explicit sex scenes.

“We welcome it to Moscow with open arms. Emmanuelle Beart is my favorite actress, and she is doing all these indecencies with her husband, and I enjoyed it a lot,” said Kirill Razlogov, the festival’s program director.

One program that always draws great interest at the festival is “8 1/2,” brought together by curator Pyotr Shepotinnik.

“We have everything: great masters, as well as young, unknown directors,” said Shepotinnik, who recommended Swedish director Florin Serban’s movie “If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle,” about an inmate at a juvenile detention center; Samuel Maoz’s wartime movie “Lebanon,” which won the Golden Lion at Venice last year; and “Of Gods and Men,” the story of monks in Algeria threatened by Islamic extremists, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes last month.

Another much-anticipated program is “Asian Extremes,” which will show, among others, “Face” by Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, about the biblical story of Salome, and “Poetry” by Lee Chang-dong, about a woman discovering the power of poetry, which won the best screenplay award at Cannes.

Other programs include the best of modern Chilean cinema, restored “spaghetti western” masterpieces by Sergio Leone and retrospectives by Besson and legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.

Meanwhile, Razlogov was equally vocal about the exclusive showing of the North Korean movie “Notes of a Woman Soldier,” about a girl who is unhappy about her posting but — in typical totalitarian propaganda cinematic style — soon learns the error of her ways and how much she loves her country.

“It is a good movie with a lot of young girls in uniform, who look like characters in Western porn films,” Razlogov said.

Outside of feature films, there is a documentary program that includes, “The Cove,” an Academy Award-winning documentary about dolphin hunting in Japan.

Organizers say most films will be in their original language with either Russian subtitles or a translation via headphones. But it is always worth checking on the festival hotline before you buy a ticket.

The festival will close with Besson’s latest film, “The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec,” a tongue-in-cheek adventure tale involving pyramids, pterodactyls and a mummy.