A Touch of Wind - Прикосновение ветра
FIRST FILM COMPETITION
DIRECTOR: Olga Veremeeva, Elena Demidova
SCRIPT: Olga Veremeeva
Producer: Anastasiya Razlogova, Anjei Petras
Sound Director: Ilya Veremeev
COUNTRY: Russia; 77 min.
LANGUAGE: Russian, English subtitles
Official Synopses:
"A documentary within a fiction story. An experiment. The shooting of the film takes place in Buryatia, the southeastern part of Russia that is considered the hub of Buddhism in Russia."
The film has a very original and unusual plot concept where reality and fiction intertwine. The invented story is conjoined with the film's documentary film matrix in such a way that it is hard to separate the two, they become a single whole.
The plot takes place in Buryatia, and autonomous region in Russia. If you search on Google Maps for Buryatia, you will see that it hugs the upper tip of the Lake Baikal in Siberia, and rans along almost all of the lake's south-east shore, coming to the stop at the border with Mongolia. It is an unknown region to most people.
So what part of the film is the fictional story and how does it glue together with the documentary part? The invented story is about Yulia, an ageing actress from Moscow, who gets a role in the film to be shot in Buryatia. She profits from this situation to try to find and reconnect with her boyfriend from the long gone student years. She is a Russian and he is a Buryat, and what ties them together, unknown to him, is far more than the memories of their bygone love...
Coming to Buryatia, Yulia reconnects to her past and also to her own spirituality when she meets Eduard. This is when the documentary part begins as Eduard starts to introduce first Yulia and then to the entire film's crew the sacred spiritual places of Buryatia, the colourful Buddhists temples, a traditional skills and competition festival, as well as the natural vistas of the land. The spectators share this journey with the actress and the film crew, and get to discover an amazing region of the world that most did not know existed. This journey brings Yulia to some personal soul searching, a realization how untruthful she was in her life, and a personal cleansing, release of her past.
It is also noteworthy how the film incorporates into its plot the real auditions for the principle female role, and how this ties together with the documentary matrix of the film. Although the questions the prospective actresses were had been compiled before the interviews, and the women were told they would be filmed during their auditions, their answers and reactions are real and unpremeditated. Also, both Anya's Eduard's names are their real-life names. And Eduard is an opera singer, the same as his character in the him.
Several members of the crew were present at the Montreal World Film Festival screening. They presented their film on the stage before the projection and answered questions from the audience afterwords. Photos below show the film crew before the projection of the film. On the left are the film director and script writer Olga Veremeeva with her husband Ilya Veremeev who is the film's Sound Director and their daughter in the pram. On the right they are joined on the stage by the Film Producer Anastasiya Razlogova and the Music writer and compiler Andjei Petras.
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