Irina Kupchenko is recognized as a “spiritual actress”

Only eight paintings are presented in the competition, and those were hardly obtained. Film distribution veteran Lyudmila Tomskaya commented on the current situation: “Producers think for a long time whether to give a film or not. Today they are not the people who add something to the budget of the picture, they use the state budget.” Sergei Ursulyak’s The Righteous, for example, was not given, referring to the mythical international release of the film. The festival gains at the expense of a retrospective timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the birth of composer Isaac Schwartz, actor Mikhail Pugovkin, director Sergei Mikaelyan, the 85th anniversary of Alexei German, Yuri Yakovlev and Vyacheslav Tikhonov. A jubilee program has been prepared for the 90th anniversary of the now living Alexander Mitta.

Petersburg is a city of active veterans. On the opening day of the festival, the old guard gathered – 94-year-old Tatyana Piletskaya, who does not hide her age, 92-year-old Ivan Krasko, 91-year-old Georgy Shtil. These days, Alisa Freindlikh and Oleg Basilashvili played the play “Summer of One Year” on the stage of the BDT. All of them are in the working order, and such a thirst for life in these people!

Stanislav Lyubshin, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday, arrived from Moscow, recalling the words of the playwright Alexander Volodin: the older a person is, the more optimistic he looks at life. “The best is always ahead,” Lyubshin added on his own behalf. – I recently had a premiere at the Moscow Art Theater, and every time someone emphasizes that such an event happened to a person, referring to my anniversary. I tried to avoid all this. When I was little, I always counted how old I was, I was so proud that I was already big. And now you can see for yourself how big I am. I am proud that I first set foot on St. Petersburg soil when I was a soldier and came to take exams at the military engineering school. I got off the train and went to October Square. An elderly man passed by, whom I asked where Sadovaya, 11. He looked at his watch and said: “Son, let’s go. I will accompany you.” We walked with him along Nevsky Prospekt, turned off. “You go on yourself, otherwise I’ll be late for the night shift,” and directed me further. Then I realized what Leningraders are.

A year ago, Sergey Puskepalis came to the festival. Now the evening of his memory has passed. Director Alexander Proshkin recalls how they met in St. Petersburg: “An open person, a fountain of energy, strict in his ideas about life. Personality. Remained in memory. At the festival, you understand what happened during the year, that you won’t see someone anymore. Terrible losses. No Armen Medvedev, Vadim Abdrashitov. Sergey Dreiden passed away this week. Seryozha is a St. Petersburg planet, an amazing artist, an intellectual. Completely unexpected departure. Like a blow to the head.”

Sergei Dreiden died on May 8 at the age of 82 in Finland. For more than a week, his relatives have been trying to overcome bureaucratic red tape in order to deliver the body of the deceased to St. Petersburg. Film director Andrey Zaitsev became friends with Sergei Simonovich after filming The Blockade Diary. Fortunately, I managed to make a documentary film about him, which will soon premiere at the Bolshoi Theater. This summer, Andrei planned to shoot a feature film with Dreyden and Freindlich as spouses, which were written with these outstanding artists in mind. Without Dreyden, nothing adds up. Great Alice is not ready to act.

As for Alexander Proshkin, he was forced to head the jury due to the illness of the actor and director Alexander Baluev, who is in intensive care. “I am a chairman by misfortune, a locum tenens,” Alexander Anatolyevich clarified the situation. “Alexander Baluev was supposed to be the chairman of the jury, but he became seriously ill.”

Irina Kupchenko, who celebrated her anniversary, arrived for a day to receive the award “For Spirituality in Culture”, managed to go only to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra and returned to Moscow. “My first shooting days were spent here. I starred in Konchalovsky’s Nest of Nobles. It rained on the first day of shooting, it rained on the second day, and on the tenth day, too. We started shooting interiors while waiting for it to end. I signed up for the library, copied Pasternak’s poems into a notebook. Until now, when it starts to rain, I get a nagging feeling. I lived in this city more than one alien life, I lay on the bed of Empress Maria Alexandrovna, which I played. It’s unimaginable now, but in the Soviet Union cinema was the most important of the arts. When I played Karamzin, we filmed at night in Pushkin’s apartment on the Moika. “Star of Captivating Happiness”, “Vacation in September” … You can’t list all the films and roles that I lived here. All my youth was spent on the train. In the evening you sit down and go to St. Petersburg, shoot and come back. For a week in St. Petersburg, you become softer, more delicate: “Oh, sorry. Sorry. Please,” says Irina Kupchenko.

All her life she has served in the same theater, having so many opportunities in the cinema, having worked there with outstanding directors. The reason for the constancy is surprising to outsiders, but for Kupchenko everything is natural.

– An actor cannot explain why he is an actor, why he puts on someone else’s mask all his life, which is especially difficult with age. It’s like a disease. Everything depends not on conservatism, but on a vocation, which is not given to everyone in any profession. In repertory theatres, as a rule, people work all their lives. They didn’t run before, but now they run. More opportunities to earn money, many series, easier to film than it used to be. But mostly they value their work. Once a person was born like this and cannot do anything else, he is happy with this and dies on the stage. We do not choose anything at all, we depend on what we are offered or not offered. Lyusya Gurchenko did not play for 15 years, and not because someone did not allow her. But because the director does not see and does not see. You can’t do anything about it,” says Irina Petrovna.

The twin directors Alexander and Vladimir Kotts (he is 15 minutes older) are already 100 years old for two. They wanted to skip the date unnoticed – it did not work out. “We met here for the first time in the last month. Sasha shoots in one part of the country, I shoot in another, said Vladimir Kott. “We didn’t even notice that we filmed so much.”

The Unfading Audience Love Award on the occasion of his 65th birthday and 100 roles behind him was awarded to St. Petersburg actor Alexander Polovtsev. Presenting the award, his colleague in the “Streets of Broken Lanterns” Sergey Selin originally described his friend: “Sasha can do a lot of things, but most importantly, he knows how to make children.”