Irina Evteeva received the Grand Prix for the film on frozen glass

Irina Evteeva filmed the film “The Nutcracker, a Piano and a Wreath of Dandelions” for almost three years and recently received the Grand Prix for it at the 29th “Literature and Cinema” festival in Gatchina. It is based on a story by Vadim Mikhailov from the series “Siege Fates”. And the film was drawn on frozen glass.

Irina Evteeva has received prizes more than once, but, probably, the main thing for her remains the “Silver Lion” at the Venice Film Festival for “Clown.” This is perhaps her only film that did not become a film adaptation. All other paintings are based on literary works – “Petersburg”, “Little Tragedies”, “Arventur” according to Green, “Melody of a String Tree” based on the super story “Ka” by Velimir Khlebnikov…

Irina Evteeva is not only an original director, but also a candidate of art history, senior researcher at the Russian Institute of Art History, professor, head of the department of film and photography at the St. Petersburg Institute of Culture. “MK” has already told how she is filming the film “Hotel Onegin” in her studio, the hero of which finds himself surrounded by Pushkin’s characters.

“The Nutcracker…” Irina filmed in 36-degree heat, and on the screen it was winter. She only had four days of filming, and further work took almost three years. After watching it, one of the Gatchina spectators recalled the evacuation of the writer Bianchi, who lived somewhere nearby during the war. “We are pre-war. There are already few of us,” she said, almost crying. The main characters – teenagers Masha and Sergei – met in besieged Leningrad and support each other, defeating hunger every day.

— Have you received awards at the Literature and Cinema festival more than once?

— I received my first Grand Prix in 1996 for “Elixir”. There were awards for best director – for “Little Tragedies” and “Arventure”, a special jury prize for “Petersburg”, awards for “Faust” and “Theseus”. All my film adaptations were celebrated in Gatchina. Diplomas testifying to this decorate the walls of my apartment. Only “Clown” was left without awards, since it is not a film adaptation.

— “The Nutcracker…” became part of the siege cycle?

– Yes. I was finishing “Melody of a String Tree” when producer Larisa Guchkovskaya approached me. Her studio was two floors above my studio. I work for a long time, as you know. And she launched a series of animated short stories “Siege Fates” and invited me to participate. I refused because it’s hard to enter into the blockade topic, and it’s impossible to do something just like that. The novellas were written by Vadim Mikhailov. Only in Gatchina did I find out that he died this year. He was over 90. We didn’t really meet each other. I just chose one of his short stories. It was called “Dandelion Wreath,” and instead of a piano there was a violin. A girl and a boy meet, everything is the same as in my film, only there is no Nutcracker. But since the action takes place on December 24, this is the decision that came to mind. Christmas, cold, heroes meet. My girl’s mother became an artist. My daughter and I are reading a book about the Nutcracker. Each director made his own short story in isolation from each other, as is usually the case when creating an almanac. But this is a film adaptation by the same author, and we were united by the theme – children and the blockade.

— I’ve looked at your picture several times, and I’m always surprised by the Christmas tree painted on the wallpaper, replacing a real one.

“It appeared thanks to my mother’s story.” A girl she went to school with had such a Christmas tree painted on her wallpaper at home. And until I found out about it, nothing was thought of. And my mother had her own story. Her parents, my grandparents, went to Stalingrad. Grandfather Fyodor Fedorovsky was an actor, he starred there in “The Defense of Tsaritsyn” by the Vasilyev brothers and in “Secretary of the District Committee” by Ivan Pyryev. His mother lived in Stalingrad on the Volga, and they often came there on vacation. There the war found them. My mother was nine years old at the time. Then they were evacuated to Alma-Ata, and my mother kept a diary, which has been preserved. It is very interesting – a “folding bed” made from a matchbox. Mom wrote everything down there while they were traveling for a month and a half or two to Kazakhstan. Together with them were Mikhail Zharov, Lyudmila Tselikovskaya, the entire “laureate”. The children who were traveling on the train sat on Zharov’s backs. Mom recalled that he was very kind. She also talked about a dog to which the children wanted to give sugar. He was still there then. At some border checkpoint, the border guards told them: “Eat yourself, and then give what’s left to the dog.” I also remember this.

— And the story about the Christmas tree comes from Leningrad?

– Yes. My mother and her parents returned home in 1943. They lost a lot of relatives. And my great-grandmother and great-grandfather spent the entire blockade in Leningrad. They were then 50-something years old. Mom went to school in Kazakhstan, and when she returned, she had to move down one grade – the education was different. In her class, children told their stories of the siege. One of them is about a Christmas tree on the wall.

— Viewers ask why the film has such a title?

— A nutcracker, a piano and a wreath of dandelions are the three components on which dramaturgy is built. This is also a memory of my early film “A Horse, a Violin… and a Little Nervously.” I already had a long name, and I wanted something that rhymed.

— How long did it take you to create “The Nutcracker…”? Three years?

– Slightly less. We filmed on location in 2019. Then I did the first four minutes. But the money ran out and we went on vacation. And when the opportunity arose to continue working, the pandemic began and the studio was closed. They filmed in fits and starts. The music was recorded in 2021. Then we waited until the entire blockade cycle appeared and we received a rental certificate. The picture was lying there. It was shown in schools, and the almanac premiered at Lenfilm. Now his short stories have begun to be shown separately.

— Is anything special required from the actor who stars with you? Who played the main characters?

— Actors should understand that they won’t have to talk much. Liza Tikhonova, who played the girl, studied with me at the institute. I looked at her for a long time. She graduated from the directing department, made a feature film herself and received awards for directing. She was 22 years old when she filmed with us. Lisa is very spontaneous and is not afraid of the camera. The look is important to me, and she had it. Now I’ll tell you how I selected the girls. It’s funny. They had to run up to me and hang on, like in the scene with dad, played by Vladimir Koshevoy. Liza is thin, and I could easily wrap her around, as Volodya later did in the film. And the boy, pianist Vitaly Petrov, is now a first-year student. At the time of filming he was 16 years old. I needed him to be a pianist, to sit appropriately and keep his hands on the keys correctly.

– And to play on the windowsill like a piano?

— By the way, his grandmother drew the keyboard on the windowsill. And his dad is composer Evgeny Petrov. He has nothing to do with Olga Petrova, who wrote the music for our film (Olga Petrova is the daughter of composer Andrei Petrov. – S.H.).

— Vladimir Koshevoy, like Sergei Dreyden, whose voice-over we hear, have become your mascots.

— In the image of the girl’s father, played by Vladimir Koshevoy, I imagined Konstantin Simonov, a war reporter. Volodya Adzhamov (ballet dancer, starred in several films by Irina Evteeva. – S.H.) starred in the role of Drosselmeyer is also no coincidence. I take it off everywhere. In this film, he worked with girls who played mice in masks on a Christmas tree.

Sergei Dreyden did not appear immediately. I didn’t understand whether we needed voice-over text, and when it became clear that it was necessary, sound engineer Vladimir Persov and I came up with the idea that it was both the boy behind the scenes and the old man. The story is unclear – whether the girl died or not. And he talks about what the hero remembers at the moment.

— It’s rare when a person makes films and at the same time is also a theorist and teacher. Does one help the other?

— At first I wrote my dissertation and made amateur films. I started teaching and prepared for lectures. I didn’t know if I would ever become a director, it was such fun. Then I made “The Pied Piper” based on Alexander Greene, and that’s where it all started. Sokurov and German saw him, and I ended up in their workshop. But you have to work somewhere, because today there is cinema, but tomorrow there is no cinema. They didn’t let me leave the department at Lenfilm, and they did the right thing. Our head of the department, Genrikh Borisovich Zimmerman, said that our institute is state-owned and will always exist, I will earn money for my pension. I liked communicating with the guys, first as peers, and then in a different capacity. It is good to coexist with young people. I wrote a dissertation on genre formation in Soviet animation of the 1950s–1980s, defended it in 1991, and at the same time filmed an episode in a tavern in “A Horse, a Violin… and a Little Nervously.” It happened that way.

— You recently wrote a book about film adaptations in Soviet animation of the 1940s–1990s. Why did you choose this topic?

— I was interested in trends: books, illustrations, films, as well as intertextuality, text in the context of other texts. Remember the old “Cat House”? On the one hand, this is an opera by Nikita Bogoslovsky, on the other, Vasnetsov with his drawings. Considering how and who influenced whom is a fascinating process. I usually write during vacations or holidays, but I wrote this book in the hospital while I was being examined. I wrote in fits and starts, not like a normal theorist. I’ve been writing like this all my life.

— How many cartoons have you reviewed and covered?

— I wanted there to be a thousand, but it turned out to be 993 films, and I watched almost all of them. The text was ready when I decided to also cover animation from the former Soviet republics. Some of them are amazing. I would have made a slightly different book, having reviewed all this in advance.

— Who turned out to be the most popular author for film adaptations?

– Marshak, Mikhalkov, Prishvin. Folk tales. As soon as the times of prohibition begin, Andersen, the brothers Grimm, Pushkin, Chekhov, Kuprin immediately come. In the interpretations of the troubadours, the same “Bremen Town Musicians”, there is always freedom, a road. They expressed the mood of the people. Unlike the Brothers Grimm, where the kingdom had to be taken, the princess had to be won. All this is very interesting.