Toma Selivanova presented her debut film in Rotterdam: a journey through the remains of the Gulag
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The world premiere of the Russian film “Ashes and Dolomite” by Toma Selivanova took place at the Rotterdam International Film Festival of Debut, Author and Experimental Films. She participates in the “Bright Future” competition and talks about a journey into the Stalinist past, through the remains of the Gulag.
Toma Selivanova is a graduate of the Moscow School of New Cinema (workshop of Dmitry Mamulia), where she came from the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University. Her short film Cow premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2019. Now she’s back with her debut feature, Ashes and Dolomite, backed by The Hubert Bals Fund, named after festival founder Hubert Bals.
In her debut, Selivanova played the main role – director Dina – and after the screening she asked the audience not to identify themselves and their heroine, since they are two different people. She conducted a casting and reviewed dozens of actresses. Information has appeared that Agniya Kuznetsova will play the main role in her film. As a result, Toma herself played Dina, who goes on a trip to Russia with the German musician Johan from Belgium.
They will visit Karelia and Magadan, where signs of bygone times are still preserved – decayed reminders of Stalin’s camps, which local residents no longer pay attention to. There is no emphasis on this in the film, but any tourist coming to Kolyma can see this. There are still guard towers there, which have become a familiar part of the landscape. Dina’s relatives became victims of Stalin’s repressions, and so did Toma Selivanova’s. Johan’s grandfather died in the vastness of the USSR, possibly in Kolyma. Nothing is known about him. He was a prisoner of war and probably built something after the war. On the surviving crosses of the abandoned cemetery, only the serial numbers of the deceased are indicated. There are no assumptions about where the relatives of Dina and Johan died. Their journey is more of a ritual than a tribute to a specific place.
Johan was played by Anton Rival, known as the blogger “Anton from France”, and more recently an in-demand actor, mainly for the roles of foreigners. His parents met in Moscow: his father is French, his mother is Russian. He is from Paris, she is from Moscow. Anton grew up in France, and at the age of 19 he moved to Russia and graduated from the Moscow Art Theater School. He played Pierre Durand in the film “The Frenchman” by Andrei Smirnov, starred in “Medea” by Alexander Zeldovich, “Actresses” by Fyodor Bondarchuk. So Anton Rival is not a German from Belgium, but a Frenchman from Moscow, and he not only acts in films, but also works as a creative producer.
Toma Selivanova’s characters speak Russian, English and French, but not German, since Dina does not know German, and this circumstance has to be explained to passengers on the bus during their journey. There, a foreigner is a rare bird, and women are ready to introduce him to their daughters – no matter that Dina is next to him. During the journey, she and Johan will meet a woman whose father is German and whose mother is Polish Jewish. At the same time, she herself is Russian, and her family was also affected by the realities of Stalin’s time.
It feels like the heroes don’t have any clear plan. They just go to places where people died. The main thing is the atmosphere, and this is a distinctive feature of many works by students and graduates of the Moscow School of New Cinema. At film school festivals, their films can be easily identified by the spirit of the place and time, by their desire, and often by their ability to capture the atmosphere.
A feeling of love will arise between the characters, but Dina will make an inexplicable choice, and many viewers will be surprised to ask why this happened. It would seem that there is no reason for this. Something doesn’t fit internally here, it has no reason.
The film featured not only actors, but also local residents. The faces are unrecognizable, and the illusion of a borderline state between fiction and documentary cinema is created. But as soon as a geologist, played by screenwriter and actor Konstantin Murzenko, appears on the path of the heroes, the precarious balance will disappear. This is a fiction movie after all.
The road movie was also presented in the main competition of the festival, in which the first and second films of novice directors participate and the main awards are given out – three equal “Tigers”. In Australian director Yeadon Martin’s feature-documentary debut Headless, an old man takes a nostalgic trip to the rum-producing town of his childhood, Bundaberg. Cass—that’s the name of both the hero and actor Cass Comerford—hasn’t been there for more than 20 years. He lives alone. His wife died. The only son passed away at a young age. Along the way, Cass makes new friends, mostly older and eccentric people. It’s amazing how much attention and care people show to an old man, whom they seemingly don’t even care about.
Those he meets along the way experience their own joys and dramas. One of them’s elderly father, with whom they worked in a Chinese cafe, dies. And he will accept Cass as his own. Together they will perform the Chinese farewell rites. Cass is like a reed not blown by the wind, he goes where he is blown. He undergoes the baptism ceremony in the lake only because he met people who offered him to perform the ritual.
A frail old man travels by car, and a portrait of an entire country appears. Nothing special seems to happen, but Cass remains in the memory. Whether he really is the same as we saw him on the screen can only be speculated. The main thing is the spirit, the sensations that most often captivate novice directors, which most of them will then have to abandon on the way to professional life, where the laws are completely different.
Newspaper headline:
Two journeys into the unknown
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