Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF) is held since 1959 and gradually it has become one of most respectable and prestigious film-forums in the world. In 1973 MIFF was registered by the International Federation of Film-producers associations (FIAPF) as an «A» class film festival alongside with those in Berlin, Cannes, San-Sebastian, Karlovy Vary and Venice.

This is the 10 year Media Forum is organized as part of the Moscow International Film Festival. The role of new media in audiovisual art and culture received due recognition and Media Forum was immediately introduced into the official program of MIFF.

Media Forum is the first event of such scale in Russia and it reveals a new vision of the world of new media culture and new screen technologies to the professionals, critics and public in general. The objective of Media Forum is to demonstrate the connection between traditional and modern branches of screen culture, the impact of technological innovations on visual arts.

The programme was started in 2000 at an initiative of Aleksei Isaev, a well-known Russian media artist, curator and theorist of the new media, who founded and directed the Moscow MediaArtLab Centre.
"Contemporary screen culture finds opportunities for the most rapid, clear and actual reflexion to changes or alterations in viewer mentality. It defines this experience as avant-garde and progressive. Newest tendencies of contemporary culture connected with new technologies make it possible for us to describe this part of culture as possessing own content and audience. The audience is attracted by communicational art model, which allows for the viewers' interactive participation in the art work dramatic composition" (Aleksei Isaev)

Media Forum as action is an exchange of ideas, infusion of new forces into contemporary culture and vice versa. It is an attempt to demonsrtate the logic of new thought and new communications. At the moment it is inside media culture that new ideas go through trial and approbation, ideas that cannot be realized in contemporary art context.