Yakut driver, having retired, became an artist and sang songs of summer

The 31st Kinoshock International Film Festival has opened in Anapa, which was recently called the Open Film Festival of the CIS countries, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. But times and the situation in the world are changing. This festival is dedicated to the 85th anniversary of the formation of the Krasnodar Territory. And in the local market and in the city, there is only talk about mobilization and agendas that were distributed at night, about military registration and enlistment offices, where there is nowhere for an apple to fall.

It is difficult to say where is the truth and where is fiction, but the conversations against which the festival opened by some miracle are the most incredible. We were introduced to a bus driver who served in hot spots and has now received a summons. He has three small children, the youngest of whom is four months old, and his wife is very ill. In such a situation, people probably have no time for movies and red carpets. The latter was out of the question under the circumstances. The Star Walk was canceled, but the filmmakers took to the summer stage, presented Yulia Trofimova’s film Sasha’s Country about young guys entering adulthood when it is not clear what awaits them. A moment of silence was observed for those who had recently left. The list of losses is huge. It was completed by the film director Vladimir Krasnopolsky, who died on the opening day of the festival at the age of 90, and who together with his second cousin Valery Uskov shot serial films Eternal Call, Two Fates, Wolf Messing: Seeing Through Time.

The author of dozens of series that the whole country watched, he was an extremely modest person. The audience knew and loved his films, and if you ask them who Krasnopolsky and Uskov are, they will not answer. And they made films until their advanced years. Now Valery Ivanovich Uskov was left alone. Two years ago, Vladimir Krasnopolsky and I recalled Mikhail Kokshenov, who had passed away by that time, and Vladimir Arkadevich rightly said then: “The Eternal Call” has existed for so many years. I think it will be watched for a long time. I don’t know if Mikhail Kokshenov received the honorary title of Honored Artist, but he had much more reason for this than those actors who receive titles in our time, and this happens left and right.

These words can be applied to him as well. He was a real intellectual, an educated person and a director, a professional of the highest standard. At one time, they laughed at him and Uskov: then it was believed that the series were something second-rate, which means that those who shoot them are second-tier directors. But now, when we see a shaft of gray films and serials, we always remember these masters.

Competitive screenings at Kinoshock are just beginning. The Yakut actor Nikolai Soldatov came to represent the Yakut film “Songs of Summer” by Dmitry Davydov. He has been retired for a long time, all his life he was a truck driver, but for ten years now he has been acting in the Yakut cinema. For the first time he was on the set of the film “Kuta” with Stepan Burnashev. All of them, including Dmitry Davydov, live in the same Amga ulus. And until recently, Dmitry worked there as a primary school teacher, school director, until he became a world celebrity and went headlong into the cinema.

For the Yakut cinema, Amga is a real Mecca. Nikolai Soldatov said that Dmitry Davydov, with whom he starred in his debut film “Bonfire in the Wind”, wants to organize a film studio there. It’s high time – a new generation of filmmakers is growing up. Soldatov also told MK that he was acting as a shaman with a young director and debutant from the same ulus. Many at the festival mistook him for a shaman himself, with shoulder-length gray hair and a piercing and tenacious gaze. He can’t cut his hair – the director who is filming does not allow it. Nikolai turned out to be a shy person, he is worried about what he will say at a press conference. At the opening ceremony he appeared in a colorful national costume. Nikolai told MK that he works as an actor in the folk theater, and there are several of them in Amga. There’s a real treasure trove of talent out there. It is enough to watch Yakut films to be convinced of this.

“Songs of Summer” is a very unusual picture. Far from people lives an old man, who was played by Nikolai Soldatov. He is very happy on the sidelines of life, especially since there is an occupation – moonshine. On vacation, his grandson comes to him, who is bored away from people, but incredible events take place that are impossible in ordinary life, and there is no time for boredom. The film was shot in the slapstick genre, which is rare for us, when the actors work caricatured and comical, which requires great skill and filigree. Yakut non-professional performers do an excellent job with this.

– There was an idea to make “Songs of Summer” entirely in gibberish, – says director Dmitry Davydov. – But I realized that it would be too difficult for our audience. Now the characters speak the Yakut language. I wanted to make an impression film, so that you get the feeling that you are sailing on the waves of history and having fun. But in the process of work, something else began to be born at an allegorical level. “Songs of Summer” will have a continuation – the horror “Border”, where our forest inhabitants will perform in an ominous manner. And the flycatcher trilogy will end, where I will completely ignore the desire of the audience to watch a comfortable movie. It will be a very tough story about the death and rebirth of a person. In the third film, I want to show the world of forest dwellers from the inside. Young actors from Yakutsk and Moscow, connected with Yakutia, my countrymen from Amga, starred in Songs of Summer. Nikolai Soldatov and Kim Novikov have been working with me since my first films, they starred in Scarecrow, Bonfire in the Wind. For the first time on the set, I met Dmitry Yurchenko, an actor of the Russian Theater of Yakutsk.

– Do you talk to your non-professional actors? Do you explain something to them?

– I try not to explain anything in advance, not to introduce them into the psychology of the character. During the cast, I briefly pronounce the most important things in a manly way in order to understand what the actor is capable of. I can change the character and the actor during the filming. In Songs of Summer, I gave the actors more freedom than in my other films. It happened that we did not stop the camera and watched the actors, what would happen to them next. .

– And if the actor does not understand what you do in general? Does he still dutifully complete the task you set?

– All the actors were ready to work. Everything was great. There were no questions at all with their permanent actors. They do what needs to be done. It was the first time I worked with Russian-speaking professional actor Dmitry Yurchenko. I was wondering what we could do. He entered the process, offered something of his own. Everything worked out.

– The film is strange, not everyone will perceive it. Can you implement any idea?

– I’m not ready to show senseless footage of cruelty, sex and use of obscenities. I understand that people with different psyches can watch my films. I have moral concepts. As a director, you take responsibility for what you do, and you must answer for every word you say. When I see unjustified scenes on the screen, I wonder what the director was thinking. .

The Yakut “Songs of Summer”, as well as other films from Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Iran and even Mongolia (the story of Valentin Rasputin “Deadline” was filmed there), will be evaluated by a jury led by film director Sergei Snezhkin. The long-standing tradition of appointing a non-filmmaker, say, Andrey Bitov or Roman Viktyuk, as the president of the jury, as it used to be, no longer exists in the past few years. And the festival is now focused not so much on the near abroad, but on regional cinema. The competition is attended by “Tembot” student of Alexander Sokurov from the Kabardino-Balkarian workshop, a native of Nalchik Tina Mastafova.