SILENT SOULS

   “Silent souls” film by Alexey Fedorchenko.

From the very beginning of reading the script, I knew, that I need to be a part of the crew. It’s a poetic observation of on ordinary world by the main character, Aist Vsevolodovich. That approach transforms vision and give new perspective, world opens to you in different way, more emotional.

   Aleksey Fedorchenko became famous after the film "First on the Moon", that was done in mockumentary genre. In our film, pseudo-documentary style is also partly used, only it is made more subtle and artistic. There is a contrasting combination of the history and traditions and the extremely real environment. The visual solution was based on the search for harmony in the simplicity. The filter of poverty  cleaned the world from accidental and temporary.

  Being a road movie by structure, it’s basically a tale, but done as believably as possible.  The film tells us about almost forgotten nation, that still live among us. We recognize them through their funeral rite. No one knows whether such a people existed or not, they lost their language and culture, only some rituals left.

    Thus reality was the key thing. With the help of art-direction we need to persuade viewer in credibility. That’s why from the beginning we had decided to shoot only on locations with a real light. In that case we were looking for isolated places, distant from any big city. The settlement of Koslan near Syktyvkar has been chosen as a central place, the hero's homeland. Almost cut off from a civilization, it developed in his own way. It was based as logging factory and it is almost completely wooden. This wood was never painted, washed up by rains, it became dark silver.

   The settlement of Koslan is formed around the river and stands on the hilly coast. Constructed in 1940th it all consists of apartment houses and is almost deprived of private ones. This strict geometry of parallelepipeds, casting metal, rhythmically organizes landscape.

   The cities across Volga river from Kineshma and Yuryevets to Gorbatov on Oka became the second part of the locations. There is nothing more Russian, than these places. Water has in the movie special mystical sense, and all our places have been located on the rivers. The proximity of big water, gives a shade of slow withering to these places. Piece and sadness poured there was for us the main value.

 Director Alexey Fedorchenko

 DOP Mikhail Krichman

 Production Designer Andrey Ponkratov

 Set Decorator Alexey Potapov