General Entry - Emerging Talent Awards

Sochi will never be as it was. Hot, light-hearted city rich in trees and bushes is now floating in construction dust. Nothing but monstrous high-risers can grow on Black Sea resort land fattened with capital flood. The city is gasping for air – its old crooked streets have been blocked with luxury cars and new straight highways - with the construction machinery. Beachgoers who in summer were the majority of Sochi population have been forced out by migrants working their ass off summer and winter alike. Those locals which “had copped a tube” in time, were carried out to the shore of the private welfare. The others were cut adrift from their roots, washed out and pulled into the dark. Cars, people, money are streaming here as a free falling avalanche and run into a crater of the Olympics. Its centre shines with luxurious skiing resorts and ice palaces built on an imperial scale. Its periphery displays desert health resorts, dirty beaches and down-and-out habitations. But away from all this, out of the inhabited borders of the city there exist quite a different world. Old undisturbed forest extends tens of kilometers deep into the mountain scenery. Rapid rivers and streams cut through the rocks and carry out ice slush to the sea. Wild beasts wear tracks across the land a man had never walked through. And such is the real Sochi that reveals its soul to everyone who knows where to search for the true values.