A good deal will not be called a marriage?

The film premiere of the film “Our Winter” by the famous Yakut director Stepan Burnashev took place at the end of last year in St. Petersburg. From March 31, the film can be seen in the KION online cinema, where it has just premiered.

Burnashev is an interesting and well-known author both abroad and in Russia; his creative style is characterized by a constant experiment with genres. Burnashev’s directorial portfolio includes both horror and social dramas. His film “Black Snow” was highly appreciated at the film festival in Vyborg “Window to Europe”, his almanac of village stories “Yt” received a prize at the 37th Warsaw Film Festival. The director has a Grand Prix and other awards in his arsenal.

This time, Stepan Burnashev made a melodrama … about the positive aspects of divorce.

The heroes of this philosophical tape are a married couple who have been married for ten years. Dima has his own phone repair company, Lida is promoted to a construction company, where she is in good standing. But inside this seemingly prosperous family, tension is steadily growing. The spouses understand that in such a situation it is best to divorce, both need to somehow move on. At the same time, the friends of the couple do not understand at all where this is “next”, and why the spouses should feel better apart than together. Lida sees this “further” in climbing the career ladder, and Dima sees it in participating in the filming of a film that his friend started.

The melodrama Our Winter is a very atypical film. He concentrated on the theme of the separation of two people, but the director’s attention is devoted to the growth of the characters, their transformation after the divorce, and not the moment of their nervous separation from the traditional cymbal smashing. It symbolizes the difficult period of divorce in people’s lives, the season of winter. At the suggestion of the director, the couple’s life together, when painful seconds count, is replaced by days, weeks and even seasons when they live apart. The viewer, looking at a single serious event in the life of this family – a divorce, suddenly philosophically begins to see clearly that it is not so important, but is just one of the pages in the history of two specific people. The view, of course, is controversial, but there is such a point of view on marriage, and the author has every right to it.

Perhaps some of the audience will agree with the director, some will not, but he insists that sometimes it is more promising to leave than to try to change yourself within your own family system. And for sure – it’s better for a couple to break up than, without changing anything, to remain in a toxic relationship, poisoning each other for days, weeks and years of existence.

Each of us has our own family experience, our own arsenal of separations and meetings. In any case, Stepan Burnashev’s film is one of those that usually causes discussions at film festivals and gives rise to completely polar points of view among the audience. That is why it is interesting.

The central roles in the film are played by Irina Mikhailova, Ilya Yakovlev and Zoya Bagynanova.

Elena Bulova.

Photos courtesy of the film’s PR service