Zima

Director's Statement

How long did it take to make your short? Was it difficult to get financing? ZIMA was created within the Cinetrain project travelling from Moscow to Lake Baikal on the Trans-Siberian Railway in mid-winter 2013. The whole shooting and editing took just about a month. It was a fun and very rewarding project, but also a tough one; I’ll never forget the creative and physical struggle of trying to put together a film in such extreme conditions and little time - filming outdoors at -35 degrees and editing on the train back to Moscow. Which thoughts come to mind concerning a “European cinema community”? The first thing that comes to my mind is the diversity and richness of the different film cultures within Europe, a richness that still has great possibilities of developing and renewing itself with the next generations of filmmakers. If you owned a theatre for one night, which films would you screen? I would screen the work of directors and artists who had, for different reason and in different stages, an impact on my perception of what filmmaking could be, particularly those who explored different ways of working with factuality-based material – directors such as Chris Marker, Werner Herzog, Jonas Mekas, including the British artist John Smith. I would also love to screen some Italian films I deeply love, such as ROME OPEN CITY by Roberto Rossellini, THE ADVENTURE by Michelangelo Antonioni, AMARCORD by Federico Fellini and many others. Or maybe, in the end, I would simply try to look for films by brave, original, less known independent filmmakers and give them a chance to be seen. What is your next project? I’m working on the pre-production of my (hopefully) first feature documentary and I am starting to write a feature film script.