nerves in patterns

“For me, something that’s too autobiographical or theoretical doesn’t have agility to it. I need a fiction that can take flight, where my unconscious can come out and all these feelings that I have no control over can surface. It’s kind of the opposite of being gaslit, because you’re trusting yourself to tell the whole story. The tension is, “can I tell this story without becoming so conscious that I censor myself?”

But after that film I couldn’t work anymore. I went through such an ordeal, as also my colleagues - our film crew… thank god that boy Alyosha didn’t go mad.

[…] I don’t regret having made that film. It had a difficult genesis and a difficult history. But one has to make a difference once in a while. To commit to something worthy. Creative work is worth doing when you can offer people something truly serious, something meaningful.

How the story of this film started?

First of all I somehow felt sorry for having not made my film about the war. I was born in Stalingrad. As a boy, naturally, I saw all of those bombings.

I remember us crossing the Volga and going behind the Urals. My mom, my baby brother. We crossed the Volga in Stalingrad. It was October 1942. We were sitting in a shed on a ferry.

Stalingrad was situated on the right bank of the Volga. It was a long city. At that time 60 kilometers long. And after that it was the steppe and hills. Nowadays, I guess, it is maybe 120 kilometers long or even more. Gee, a city long like a tube.

At that time, it was all ablaze. The city was ablaze too. This patch of the fire being 1.5 kilometers wide. They had bombed a petroleum terminal, and it all went down into the fire and the water was on fire. And we were being bombed. The water reached a boiling point because of all that.

Our mothers covered us with their bodies. They put on top of us blankets, pillows and themselves, too- on top of all this. Of course I would peek out because I was curious. It was a long way to the Urals. My father stayed in Stalingrad to defend it.

Naturally I’m burdened with very strong recollections about that hell. Because it was an excursion to hell and it lived in me forever. So I thought it was a must with me to shoot a film about the war.