25-06-2011

Moscow IFF: Chapiteau-show

By Nailya Golman

    The young Russian director of Chapiteau-show Sergei Loban has developed something of a cult following.

     In 1995 he founded an underground club, which became the center of informal culture in the city for the next two years. He was working as director of the programme "...under 16 and older" on the channel ORT when Loban met Marina Potapova and Dmitry Medel, participants in the countercultural art alliance "zAiBi" (short for "For anonymous and free art"). Together they founded a creative union called "SVOI-2000".



    In 2001 at the request of the Belorussian paper "Navinki" Loban made the film Sluchay s patsanom, the first independent Belorussian film, and the recipient of the Grand-Prix at the Moscow film festival "To Love Cinema". In 2002 he made a short film, Sosi banan, and in 2005 Loban made the feature drama Pyl' / Dust, which received multiple awards, including the prize of Russian cinema critics at the 27th Moscow International Film Festival.

    {mosimage}Chapiteau-show cosists of four novels, and the authors claim that each of them is a complete film in itself - which is not hard to believe considering the length of the film is 207 minutes.

    The film looks at how people's relationships reflect on their social interactions and bonding, showing how tragically everything seems from within, and how comical it really appears from the outside. The protagonists of the four stories are connected to each other to a greater or lesser extent - some of them are acquainted in real life, others communicate through various networks. Each one of them is lives his own, private drama, not noticing what is happening to other people. Each delivers his own accusatory speech, not realizing that the words he's speaking are not really his. Their dramas deal with a variety of human relationships: love, friendship, respect and cooperation, with all the stories are developing simultaneously. And the tempest in the soul of one character reflects a tempest in the soul of another.

    {mosimage}The action takes place far from Moscow, at a sea shore against serene scenery and beautiful rugged mountains. In the moments of crisis characters find themselves on the stage of a mysterious theater where each of them can sing his "swan song". The producers plan an unusual distribution method, showing - the film in two separate sequences of two stories each ('Love and Friendsip' + 'Respect and Cooperation'). They will distribute the two-part series in cinemas.

    Shooting consisted of two periods, the first was summer-autumn 2008, when the company MIRUMIR was producing the project. After a break of one year the second stage of filming took place in autumn-winter 2009, when all the musical numbers were shot and all the postproduction was completed. At this poing, Organic Films took over as the production company, with Ekaterina Gerasicheva as general producer -- her first time producing a film. Previously, she had been a popular vj on Russian TV channels for ten years, and she was also the director of a popular internet portal, Openspace.ru.

    Credits and production information:

    ScriptMarina Potapova
    CameraIvan Mamonov,
    Evgeniy Tsvetkov
    DesignAlena Kudrevich
    MusicJacques Polyakov
    SoundAnatoliy Brandorf
    ProducerEkaterina Gerasicheva,
    Aleksey Ageev,
    Mikhail Sinyov
    CastVera Strokova,
    Aleksey Podolskiy,
    Aleksey Znamenskiy,
    Sergey Kuz'menko,
    Petr Mamonov,
    Stepan Devonin,
    Sergey Volzhin-Yastrebov,
    Sergey Popov,
    Yuliya Govor,
    Dmitriy Novikov,
    Dmitriy Bogdan,
    Anton Kuznetsov,
    Jim Avignon,
    Valeriy Zavodovskiy,
    Evgeniy Erovenkov,
    Maksim Tiunov
    ProductionOrganic Films
    CountryRussia
    Length207'
    Year2011
    World salesOrganic Films www.organicfilms.ru

    SPONSORED by Moscow International Film Festival
    http://www.moscowfilmfestival.ru/