Tina Barkalaya presented the film “The Tales of Hoffmann”

Kaliningrad Cathedral became a festival site and the hero of a film

In the Cathedral of Kaliningrad, where Immanuel Kant was buried, the XI film festival “Koroche” has opened. For ten years, only short films have been shown in the competition program of the festival, and now there is a section of full-length debuts, which was opened by Tina Barkalaya’s Tales of Hoffmann.

Tina Barkalaya has shot more than 300 commercials awarded with the Cannes Lion and other international prizes. She has several successful short films and documentaries about Boris Eifman, Nino Ananiashvili, Evgeny Kisin. The debut feature film was shot according to his own script, written several years ago.

Once, the author of these lines, somewhere in the early 2000s, when the action of The Tales of Hoffmann takes place, had a chance to participate in an interesting project of a glossy magazine. They filmed the hands of different people, who were chosen at some events and parties, if they liked jewelry. So my two hands with unusual Venetian silver rings were immortalized on the pages of the magazine. Hands can tell a lot about a person. There were a lot of them in the magazine, a whole spread or even two. One could consider and fantasize who they belong to. In the film by Tina Barkalaya, the beautiful hands of a modest library employee were in the spotlight and changed her dull life.

So, the authors warn in advance that everything could happen only at the turn of the century, when the Western world entered our lives in a grotesque form. Everything is a bit like in a fairy tale, and the ingenuous heroine of Ekaterina Vilkova, in her naivety and perception of life, resembles the French Amelie. And this is not the first case of voluntary or involuntary appeal of our filmmakers to her beautiful image. Nadezhda works two jobs – in a wretched district library, where she has an enchanting boss (Natalya Pavlenkova), and as a cloakroom attendant in the theater. She lives in Khrushchev on the outskirts of Moscow with her hopeless and worthless husband Vitalik (almost a caricature work of the talented Maxim Stoyanov). He is not busy with anything, only sleeps and eats, pushes around his downtrodden wife. But a miracle will happen. A cinematographer, a second director who needs beautiful hands in the frame, will pay attention to Nadezhda. At Nadezhda, they are just like that – white and tender. Thus began her film career. Now hands need to be groomed and cherished, smeared with cream, protected with gloves and mittens. They are paid for in dollars in an envelope. You can save up for Vitalik’s car. The benefactor from the cinema and advertising business was played by Evgeny Tsyganov. Hope fell in love with him, but is not even ready to kiss him.

Behind the scenes, the voice of Alexei Guskov constantly sounds, who, like a storyteller, comments on what is happening. On the screen, he will appear for a moment and closer to the finale. But the role was interesting to Alexei, so he even escaped for a day from Karelia, where he is filming in a new project, to present The Tales of Hoffmann. Despite the fact that everything is touching and a little make-believe, we are talking about abuse, domestic violence, not necessarily physical. The moral is worse. Acting work is bright, even quite small, like that of Ksenia Kutepova, who played the capital person who sells her property before leaving the country. There is no strength to live in the same era with people like Vitalik, whom she learns about from the story of a librarian with beautiful hands. People like him are dark.

The short film was opened by a 24-minute film with a strange postal title “Kaliningrad, Kalinin Avenue, 107, 5, 236039. Mark Jansons”. Who its author is a mystery. The director cannot make his name public because the rules of the DOGME95 manifesto, to which he (she) is an adherent, forbid it from appearing. Kira, having buried her mother, arrives in the cold winter Kaliningrad to find her biological father. She only knows the address where he lived for 20 years, but other people have settled there long ago. Kira is looking for him by chance at the zoo where he worked, on the Baltic Spit. All this was filmed by an amateur camera, but it conveys the atmosphere of the city. The story will end in the Cathedral, where the festival opened. An ancient organ will sound, the beauty of which the camera was not able to convey. By the way, movies have been shot here many times and continue to do so. And Kira will remain alone, and it is completely unclear whether she will continue to follow the trail of her unfamiliar father.

Published in the newspaper “Moskovsky Komsomolets” No. 29094 dated August 17, 2023

Newspaper headline:
“Tales of Hoffmann” in a new way