{mosimage}The film premiered in Russia on 14 April 2011. This expensive project with a budget of $7.5 million took almost seven years to complete. Ginzburg told FNE that the film was released in Russia on 540 prints and grossed almost $5 million in Russia, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Channel One (www.1tv.ru) purchased the rights to the TV premiere, while DVD sales and other ancillary rights are being explored in Russia.

Generation P adapts the eponymous postmodern novel by Victor Pelevin and follows Babylen Tatarsky, a tobacconist who starts working in an advertising agency fitting the Western brands into the "Russian mentality" shortly after the disintegration of the USSR. Combining the traits of Western culture with the main character's passion for Mesopotamian mythology (enhanced by hallucinogenic mushrooms, cocaine, and vodka), the story offers a complex view of the Russian transition to capitalism.

"I've always been drawn to stories that challenge the norm, and allow us to see beyond what we consider reality. I found Pelevin's brand of cyberpunk mysticism very appealing -- dark, with a great sense of humor, and full of revelations about the world we live in. Generation P combined a lot of things that I've lived through, both personally as a former ‘creative' in the service of the goddess Ishtar, and historically, as a filmmaker who lived through the huge transformation in Russian society after communism. And I loved the characters, who speak that juicy, slangy Russian, amazingly captured from life," Ginzburg told FNE.

He also says that beyond the parallels with Boris Yeltsin, "the film takes this idea further than the novel, as we see Babylen Tatarsky create a virtual president, played by Andrei Panin, who portrayed Putin in another movie....We also used footage from Putin's inauguration to create a virtual inauguration. The film depicts the emergence of both the Russian corporate state, and mass media in the service of Ishtar. It depicts persona non-grata Boris Berezovsky as both a perpetrator and victim of TV manipulation, takes clear stabs at the Russian government, and has scenes with drugs and foul language, which are taboo in Russian cinema. So I'm impressed and grateful to Russia for the fact that I was able to make this film freely and without any censorship, and was given a fair shot at the box office. It gives me hope that Russia remains a free country," Ginzburg told FNE.

Generation P is an independent production, produced by Djina Ginzburg and Victor Ginzburg, along with Stas Yershov from Gorky Sudios (www.gorkyfilm.ru), and Aleksei Ryazantsev from Karo Film (www.karofilm.ru). The project is a co-production between Generation P, LLC in LA and rOOm Russia and with the participation of Gorky Studios and Karo Film. Several major commercial brands also supported both the production and the promotion of the film, including Facebook, which invested $500,000 in internet advertising in exchange for basing the website of the film on Facebook, where http://www.facebook.com/GenerationP currently has 33,000 friends.

In adapting Victor Pelevin's novel, Victor Ginzburg and his wife, Djina, had to exclude some subplots but they also bring the story from the novel up to the present days. When asked about how difficult it was to adapt the novel, Victor Ginzburg answers, "Extremely. The novel has no plot in the classical sense -- no love story, no antagonist, no real conflict. It's a hallucinatory tale of a fall from grace, and a head spinning rise to power. We needed to find the suspense in the details of the risky dialogue scenes and abstract hallucinations, in the dynamics of his journey, as he went from one magical place to another, almost like Alice in Wonderland. The mystical Babylonian storyline was a real challenge. The script was being rewritten constantly, on the set and all the way into post-production. I never had a locked script."

The film has not yet recovered its costs, but Ginzburg is optimistic. "It was a huge experiment. No one believed that it was possible to adapt Pelevin and that this kind of an abstract story would ever be understood by the mass audience. Furthemore, the audiences stopped going to Russian movies, disenchanted with the quality of the films and constantly feeling cheated and looked down at. The key was to convince the movie theater managers to book the film, which we accomplished by screening excerpts at film markets. We had a big fight on our hands about foul language, but we stood our ground. We did however make two versions of the theatrical trailer, one had the ‘bleeps' instead of certain words. I think that made the film even more enticing as a result. However some theaters refused to carry the film for ideological reasons."

Given that it was a project that needed time, by the time of the premiere, it had already made quite a stir in Russia. The director says that the trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oqe-nNhp0kw) has been viewed 600,000 times, adding, "Most progressive layer of Russian society at all age groups responded to the film. College students went to see the film en masse, sometimes with their whole class, and Pelevin's book sales rose considerably."

Production Information

Generation P, LLC

10 Nineteenth Avenue

CA 90291 Venice

USA

Phone: +1 310 933 570 8

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rOOm russia

c/o Gorky Studios

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Phone: +7985 9251731

Gorky Film Studio

8 Ulitsa S. Eyzenstheyna

129 226, Moscow, Russia

www.gorkyfilm.ru

Phone: +74991814103

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Karo Film

Phone: + 7 (495) 980-88-91

Fax: +7 (495) 697-07-60

www.karofilm.ru

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