Granddaughter of Svetlana Nemolyaeva showed her film at the festival in Kaliningrad

Nemolyaeva herself played an extravagant episode in the film

Polina Lazareva’s film The Seagull premiered at the short and debut film festival Koroche in Kaliningrad. Her parents came to support her, and dad – Alexander Lazarev – starred in a small role and experienced more than his daughter.

Only Svetlana Nemolyaeva did not come to the premiere, who played a beneficial and extravagant episode in the film of her granddaughter, as soon as she knows how. But in the drama theater where the show took place, they will soon take the stage together in a touring performance. Polina Lazareva is an actress, a graduate of GITIS, where she studied at the workshop of the famous theater teacher Oleg Kudryashov. Now she works with Svetlana Nemolyaeva at the Theater. V. Mayakovsky and often accompanies her at film festivals. Polina graduated from the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors, where Alla Surikova became one of her masters.

“The Seagull” was defined as a drama. So Polina can be compared with Chekhov, who wrote comedies, which before and now are perceived as dramas. True, “The Seagull” is not a play by Anton Pavlovich, but the name of a character – a fashionable writer performed by film director Yuri Bykov, an actor by education. However, as an actor, he lacks breath for a long distance. More often he had the opportunity to play sergeants, bandits, security officials, at best – people with an unstable psyche, and here he is a representative of the intellectual elite, partly the ruler of thoughts and ladies’ man. He annoyed many on the screen, and the question naturally arose whether this was part of the director’s intentions. Perhaps, the energy of a person without properties involuntarily worked. The hero seems to be not bad, but there is not enough good in him either.

And in the center of attention is a young woman played by Vera Kincheva. A series of such heroines has passed through the films shown not only in Kaliningrad, but also recently at the festival in Vyborg. Each of them, whether she is 17-18 years old or 35+, asks the question: “What is wrong with me?” So Vera lives in anticipation of the sudden and spontaneous visits of the writer Chaika, constantly reflects, tries to sort out her own anxious states. Increasingly, female directors go in search of mood to atmospheric St. Petersburg, which on the screen fascinates and surprises with its colorful nightlife, underground environment, and glamorous “bottom”. There are many famous people in the film, up to Irada Zeynalova as an interviewer for the successful writer Chaika. And this at a time when current directors are going in a completely different direction and are busy looking for new faces …

Irina Bas filmed her first film, Warm Asphalt in Summer, about 17-year-old Dasha, played by a talented young actress Maria Matsel on the basis of Lenfilm. We recently saw her in the film “Vacation in October” by Roman Mikhailov, presented in the competition of the Vyborg Festival. The young heroine also asks permanent questions: what is wrong with her, why her mother left her. Having deceived her father, Dasha leaves Murmansk, where she was supposed to enter a serious university, to St. Petersburg, where her mother lives, whom she does not know at all. The role of the “bad mother” was played by the luxurious Victoria Isakova. She is a pianist, a beauty, she left everything for her career. Dasha takes exams at the theater institute, plunges into the radiant world of vicious Petersburg, goes through everything that you can imagine. There is energy in the picture, but the concentration of misfortunes that fell on the lot of a single girl is so great that it outweighs the fragile nuance of psychological states.

In terms of the density of immersion in the material environment, this picture can only be compared with the 20-minute short film “I Need to Tell You Something” by Evgeny Maryan, who is remembered for his full-length debut “The Milk of a Bird” back at Kinotavr. The same all-penetrating chamber, spiritualizing the environment, if not with light, then with darkness, although the habitat is of a completely different kind – a hostel, shabby rooms. And the 18-year-old heroine performed by Alexandra Bystrzhitskaya is the same lonely creature, an orphan. She is from the category of heroines, about whom we will not know anything in the near future, since they were seized with a stroke of will not only from art, but from life, leaving them alone with their problems.

Irina Bas is a graduate of VGIK, she studied with Alexander Hunt, Vitaly Suslin, Maxim Dobromyslov. She is a debutant in big cinema, but she has an active cinematic start: she shot a short film that participated in “Korocha” and became part of the almanacs “Happiness is …” and “Sixteen +”, won pitchings. She became the exception rather than the norm for In Short, not limited to victories in short films. Alas, most of the winners of numerous “shorty” festivals rarely make themselves known in the future, dissolving in obscurity. Irina Bas started working on the full meter five years ago together with screenwriter Nargiz Bagirzade, and the idea was born almost 10 years ago. Perhaps, after a quite successful start, she will shoot something completely new, free herself from the burden of female confusion, which her long-suffering heroine carries.