Silent Souls
Ovsjanki
Russia, 2010, 35 mm, 75'
directed by Aleksej Fedorčenko
screenplay Denis Osokin
cinematography Mihail Kričman
music Andrej Karasjov
sound Kiril Vasilenko
editing Sergej Ivanov
cast Julija Aug, Igor Sergejev, Viktor Suhorukov, Jurij Tsurilo
producer Igor Mišin, Mary Nazari
production April Mig Pictures, Media Mir Foundation
world sales Memento films, T +33 1 533 490 20, E sales@memento-films.com
distribution Continental Film d.o.o., T +386 1 500 51 28, E manja.verbic@continentalfilm.si
A film about a man who, with a companion, takes his wife’s dead body to the river Oka in order to deliver it to the water. Indeed, the ancient Nordic tribe Merja believed that death in a river brings immortality. But in the end, only love is immortal...
“The slogan of the film was tenderness. We wanted tenderness to be transformed into nostalgia; tenderness and nostalgia were to become synonymous with love. This feeling, this representation of the Merjan people, was something we felt the whole time we were staying in that region. The names of the rivers also bring us back to the Merjan people, and the expression on the women’s faces us reminds us of that people, that there was something different. We wanted to recreate this world that didn’t exist any longer, but was constantly present with us.” (Aleksei Fedorchenko)
“Every person knows where his story ends. Only love doesn’t have an end,” finishes the voice-over narrator’s story in the film Silent Souls. The son of the local poet and a photographer, one of the few survivors of the Merja, a disappearing Finno-Ugric tribe in western Russia, reflects on the life and death of the Merjan people as well as on their ethnic community while on a journey with his friend, whom he helps to bury a beloved dead wife.
The first person voice-over narrative in the film preserves the structure of the eponymous novel by Aist Sergeyev and allows free associations that, like a ghost, traverse times and places in order to gently caress the characters’ favourite persons, those from the narrator’s childhood to the friend’s dead wife. The latter is only indicated, an unuttered affection forced to remain a silent witness to disclosures of the married couple’s sexual adventures – a custom which allows the Merjan people to preserve a tender memory of the deceased. The narrative structure of the film and the use of long sequences that slowly turn around apparently quotidian incidents are reminiscent of the great Russian directors, such as Aleksej Balabanov and Aleksandr Sokurov. Extraordinary photography that envelopes the characters in cold grey-blue hues and suggestive music with elements of an archaic soundscape (for example, a murmuring female voice as a recurrent motif) create a mysterious atmosphere that is here and there reminiscent of the style of Swedish director Roy Andersson and simultaneously helps to relive the spirits of beloved persons in the memories of the main characters. The initially nearly realistic narrative acquires ever more dreamlike tones, and the ongoing presence of two birds in a cage (from the original title) adds to them indefinite symbolic connotations.
Silent Souls is a unique film of the street made in the creepy atmosphere of ghost films, with a touching and hardly expressed love story – and yet none of that. It is a (fictitious) autobiography of the main character and an elegiac meditation on love, life and death – of an individual as well as an entire ethnic community.
“The slogan of the film was tenderness. We wanted tenderness to be transformed into nostalgia; tenderness and nostalgia were to become synonymous with love. This feeling, this representation of the Merjan people, was something we felt the whole time we were staying in that region. The names of the rivers also bring us back to the Merjan people, and the expression on the women’s faces us reminds us of that people, that there was something different. We wanted to recreate this world that didn’t exist any longer, but was constantly present with us.” (Aleksei Fedorchenko)
Aleksei Fedorchenko
Born in 1966 in the Siberian town of Sol Iletski, Fedorchenko worked as a factory engineer on space defence projects in Ekaterinburg which might have been the original inspiration for his mockumentary about a 1930s Soviet landing on the moon (First on the Moon, 2005). After having been the director of Sverdlovsk Studio – in which he produced over 80 films – for fifteen years, Fedorchenko started making his own films. Silent Souls is his third feature film.
Schedule:
- Friday, 10. 6., 10.00, ART KINO ODEON
- Friday, 10. 6., 21.00, Open-Air Cinema MANZIOLI
