Graduation in a rural village, Voronezh region, Russia
This is one of those movies that has seriously reminded me of my age. Not necessarily in a bad way.
I suppose it’s natural for Alexey to shoot a film that’s mostly about kids – now that we have our own kid. And I’m glad I’ve been involved in this project from the start. Being his wife, it was inevitable, but some people don’t realize just *to what extent* I’ve had to be involved: whether it’s giving editing suggestions at 4 a.m. when I’m pumping breast milk, or sacrificing the family budget when we suddenly need a new computer monitor.
In our household this month, we’re dealing with a little baby boy, a hysterical director trying to finish a documentary he single-handedly shot and edited, and a cranky new mother who’s just gone back to work and who’s just had to deal with her new play premiering at the Lyubimovka festival. You can imagine what it’s been like. Or don’t, actually – if you don’t want the nightmares to haunt you.
I’m proud of us for not having gone completely insane, though. The other day, with the nanny spending the night at our place, Alexey and I sat in a kitchen of a hostel on Moscow’s busy Garden Ring, listening to the legendary playwright and screenwriter Slava Durnenkov desribe the equally legendary Hagia Sophia like only Slava Durnenkov can. A part of me wanted desperately to be home with Lev, but another part recognized the fact that I needed my walkies. I wound up ejecting Dima Bogoslavsky from the bedroom so that I could pump. Bogoslavsky is probably the biggest success of this year’s Lyubimovka – his play will soon premiere at the Mayakovsky Theater. Now that Mindaugas Karabauskis is in charge of that place, living playwrights can actually, you know, have their premiere there and stuff.
Speaking of the Mayakovsky – thanks to the nanny, again, we actually went to the Mayak restaurant next door after a night of readings at the festival. I like the Mayak – I just don’t like it on the weekends. On the weekends, some of the guests try extra hard to remind everyone that they’re freewheeling artist-types, and bang on the piano extra hard as well. It was good to sort of have a social life again, though, wreathed in smoke or otherwise.
The reading of my own new play, “The lives of living people,” went fine. Not great – but fine, considering the pressure on Alexey to edit the movie and hold rehearsals, and considering the fact that I was re-writing the new draft in the heat of the summer, with an enormous belly weighing me down. The best part was realizing that the main heroine, as interpreted by glamorous Alexandra Rebenok, is kinda a bad person.
That night on the Garden Ring, Slava asked us – “Who financed the film project? Who are the other crew members?” We had to explain that there was no funding, it was just Alexey and me, and our money. We had to explain that there was no crew. I haven’t realized before how fantastical that might seem from the outside – that this movie got done, and that it looks the way it does, and that it happens to tell a pretty profound story straight from the margins of Russian society.
I suppose we’re allowed to feel tired.
