Documentary makers made a film about how a Russian and a Ukrainian renovated a Finnish estate

Russian-Finnish director Anna Berger: “Your heroes are naked in the bathhouse – follow their example”

At the Flahertiana International Documentary Film Festival taking place in Perm, the question of the border between feature and documentary cinema once again arose. Feature films are increasingly being shot as documentaries. The viewer is lost – are these characters real or fictitious? Documentary makers defend the right to staged scenes.

European directors, despite the sanctions, do not refuse to submit their films to the Flahertiana competition – the reputation they have built up over the years is telling. The Russian premiere of “The Adventures of Gigi, a Representative of the Law” by Italian director Alessandro Comodina (special prize of the International Film Festival in Locarno, Switzerland) took place in Perm. His hero is a rural policeman who spends his days patrolling his area in a car, going wherever an alarm comes from. But this happens rarely. Life in the Italian provinces is calm. Unless the girl threw herself under a train. Gigi, investigating the circumstances of the tragedy, goes into a parallel reality, and it is no longer possible to understand where his imaginary world is and where the truth of life is. The garden near his house resembles a jungle. In the evenings, a sensitive policeman climbs the bushes and argues with a disgruntled neighbor who demands that tree branches hanging over his property be trimmed. All these are the director’s native places, his grandmother’s garden, where he spent his childhood. Now Alessandro lives in Paris, studied directing in Brussels, but prefers to shoot in his homeland, between Venice and Trieste. There is a special life and a separate dialect.

In a rural outback, a lady of his heart appears to a policeman, almost like the sad knight Don Quixote. Paola is a new police officer, a dispatcher, and a pleasure to chat with. And what adds to the romance is that they haven’t met yet. Whether she is a brunette or a blonde, as she herself claims, we don’t know. “The main character is my mother’s younger brother,” Alessandro says in an online conversation. “I’ve known Gigi since childhood. Our age difference is not very big. When I was a child, he was a teenager. As a child, Gigi taught me not to follow rules. It’s funny that he became a policeman with such an attitude towards life. Nowadays it is impossible to find a policeman like him. My uncle lives in my home village, where nothing ever happens. I thought these were ideal conditions for filming. Everything here is true, despite the fact that it’s a movie. It came as a surprise to me that my uncle began to go beyond my plan and invited Paola to dinner. His perception of what was happening led the viewer to ask: “Did it really happen or not?” There wasn’t really any dinner. But we decided to preserve the mystery, the duality of sensations. The result is a portrait of a man who sends his desires to the Universe. Paola may have such a secret desire. I’m proud that you met my uncle. He was fired from the police force when we started filming. The film became a small event in Italy and in his life. Now everyone loves my uncle.”

The question again arises whether the film can be considered a documentary, especially since the hero was fired from the police, and he continued to pretend that he was an employee. The director probably would not have been able to film anything like this if the hero were not his close relative. Since everything happens in the car and only occasionally does the policeman leave it, the question arises of how this was filmed. Alessandro explains: “We mounted the camera on a tripod behind glass. I was sitting in the back seat.”

In the film “Whom I Love…” (Finland-Russia), included in an international competition, guest workers – Russian-speaking resident of Lithuania Sergei Fedorovich of retirement age with an army career behind him and his 33-year-old partner Misha from the Ukrainian border Konotop – revive a decayed estate in Finland. Her owner, Marty, prefers to live in an old, renovated house rather than a new one. Finnish workers are expensive and demanding, so it is easier to hire immigrants from the USSR. In Finland, as it turns out, wallpaper is nailed, and this amazes Sergei Fedorovich, who has seen everything. Now the partnership between a Russian and a Ukrainian looks like some kind of rarity, and modern realities give the film new meanings.

“I shot the film at the beginning of 2020,” says director Anna Berger. She was born in Helsinki, graduated from the performing arts school there, and received a bachelor’s degree in French literature from Oxford University. In 2018, she went to Moscow to enroll in VGIK and studied in the workshop of documentary filmmaker Sergei Miroshnichenko. Marty is her father. His grandmother is a Russian from St. Petersburg who left Russia in 1918. Marty, according to his daughter, is nostalgic for his Russian roots. He speaks Russian well and knows several languages. Anna herself speaks eight languages ​​and speaks Russian well with a slight accent that reveals her as a foreigner. The film features songs performed by singer and explorer of Russian diaspora Viktor Leonidov, with whom Marty is familiar. Misha prefers not to talk much. Filming irritates him a little. He prefers to be left alone at least in the evening. And the older partner likes to philosophize, talk with Marty about Russian culture, and enjoys his appearance in the frame.

Anna herself starred in the film, and in bold scenes, because she is sure that the director, if he is also a character, should be on an equal footing with others. If your heroes are naked in the bathhouse, then you should follow their example. Since the situation has changed radically, the viewer is concerned with the question of what happened to Misha from Konotop. It turned out that everything was fine with him, he was working in Germany.