A portrait of the poet Lydia Grigorieva, filmed in her London home and garden and cut against archive footage of the 1960s thaw and the circle of young writers she belonged to. Director, producer and writer.
Selected work
The film was also presented at the Salon de la littérature russe in Paris.
Selected for the competition programme and awarded in the documentary category.
Presented at the festivals' joint ceremony in London.
French-language database of Russian cinema.
What I make
Portraits of people whose work is made of language: poets, novelists, critics, translators. The problem with filming a writer is that the work happens invisibly, so the film has to find where it surfaces, in a garden, in a reading, in an argument about a line. That is the part I am interested in.
- Feature-length documentary portraits, 40 to 90 minutes
- Short films for exhibitions, festivals and institutional programmes
- Archive-based work, including research and rights clearance
- Filmed interviews and conversation series
- Documentation of literary and art events, cut as a film rather than as coverage
Background
Before directing my own films I worked in television production, including a documentary on the Sorbonne for the series Universities of the World. I trained as a writer at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow, which is why my films tend to start from a text.
- Member, International Federation of Journalists
- Member, Union of Russian Writers, and of the PEN Centre
- Jury member for cultural awards, including SIFFA
- Reference: Wikipedia entry
Languages
I direct in Russian and English and deliver subtitled versions in both. Where a film is intended for festivals outside those languages, I prepare the subtitle script myself rather than sending a transcript to be translated, because a poem in a subtitle is not the same problem as a sentence.
Working together
Institutions, festivals, publishers and estates are welcome to write directly. Tell me the subject, the length you have in mind, the delivery date and whether archive is involved. If a film is worth making I will say what it would take; if it is not, I will say that too.
Budgets and fees are agreed per project and quoted on request. They depend on length, shooting days, archive rights and post-production.
On a portrait made for an institution the subject is consulted on accuracy, not on judgement. I do not hand over final cut, and I say so before the first shooting day.