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Director's Statement
Looking back, it seems that for my whole life I have been preparing to make AQUARELA. Almost 50 years ago, when I was just four years old, I spent one summer in a small village between Moscow and St. Petersburg. In that village was the source of a river. A man who lived there, Mikhail Belov, said to me, “Imagine Victor, if you made a little boat from wood chip and leaves, then put it in this river, it would float on the water to the North Sea and then around the world.”
I returned to that village 25 years later to shoot my film, BELOVY, which is about the people who live at the source of the river. The first episode was exactly as Mikhail had described to me: I put my camera into a little boat and I made an almost 1,000 km journey from that village to the sea. For this river scene I used a song from one of Raj Kapoor’s films. I had chosen this song, without knowing Hindi, simply because of its powerful energy, which fit well with my river episode. A few years later, and after a screening in India, some people told me that the song is about a river that flows like our lives.
Then, in the year 2000, while editing my film, I LOVED YOU, at Bornholm Island, I stayed in a house with a window looking out on the Baltic Sea. I noticed that the sea was different every day, every hour, even every minute. I was never bored because the water was never the same. I thought that if I could just film the waves from my window during a whole year, I could easily make a great film, without saying a word and without moving the camera, just watching the water changing! Different colours, different movements, different energies … through the natural lens of water you would be able to experience and feel the ebb and flow of all known human emotions — anger, aggression, peacefulness, nobility, loneliness, jealousy … everything!
With AQUARELA, I wanted to film every possible emotion that can be experienced while interacting with water — beautiful emotions, along with unsettling emotions of ecstasy and inspiration, as well as destruction and human devastation.