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RUSSIAN ROULETTE
Quentin Falk reports from Moscow on a vibrant industry juggling
W hether you’re on the back lot at Paramount
in the States or Pinewood in England, there’s that common sense of sheer timelessness.
It’s really no different at Mosfilm Studios especially when you’re weav- ing your way through a $900,000 maze of period streets and buildings bril- liantly recreating 1904 Moscow for a recent Russian box-office hit called The Rider Named Death.
But perhaps the big difference between West and East is the palpable sense of a nation’s radical history past and present that almost overwhelms you on a visit to this huge film and TV- making complex right in the heart of a great capital.
And just a recitation of some the famous film names that have passed through Mosfilm’s gates since shooting began more than 80 years ago are enough to stir a buff’s blood – from Eisenstein, Dovzhenko and Pudovkin to Chukhrai, Bondarchuk and Tarkovsky.
Mosfilm’s first ever film, Up On The Wings, was helmed in 1923 by the stu- dio’s inaugural director, Boris Mikhin, while one of its most recent, the afore- mentioned Rider, is the work of its lat- est incumbent, Karen Shakhnazarov.
Shakhnazarov, who has been run- ning the studios since 1998 while still successfully juggling his own film-making career, is naturally proud of Mosfilm’s
rapid modernisation, which includes 13 stages and a British-designed sound-mix- ing facility on its 79 acres.
State-owned but mostly self-funded, principally by television companies, Mosfilm nevertheless represents the classic bind faced by an industry dra- matically re-adjusting to the free mar- ket since the collapse of Communism.
Although Shakhnazarov says all the right things about how Mosfilm is now ready, willing and able to accom- modate international filmmaking, he’s also honest enough to point out the downside: notably the high cost of Moscow itself which doesn’t compare favourably with, say, Prague or Sofia.
Mosfilm, boasting an annual turnover of $50m and a current roster of some 140 projects, remains easily the biggest of the country’s four main studios, which also includes names like Gorky and Lenfilm (in St Petersburg).
They will be joined soon by a new, if rather more modest, Moscow complex currently being developed by Top Line Production. Expected to be completed in a year and a half and costing $4m- $5m, it’ll have a couple of sound stages and digital post-production available.
Founded just three years ago, Top Line, run by the tireless Sergei Gribkov, is now very much part of a brave new world in Russian film- making. With foreign - mostly Hollywood – films dominating the box office (indiginous product accounts for between only 5-7 per
cent of the domestic market) Gribkov is determined to try and even things up a bit.
He recalls the time when “the so- called commercial cinema was lost somewhere in the shadows, while ‘art- house’ films were widely distributed. Directors received money from the state to shoot films about whatever they liked, and the viewers simply did- n’t want to watch them.
“There was disaster after disaster and the image of Russian film went crashing through the floor. Now, Russia has entered a time when we’ve all begun to understand that cinema is not just a means of self-expression but also a business.”
So to counter successful imports like American Pie and Road Trip, Top Line came up with its own ‘youth’ for- mula in 2003’s Don’t Even Think! and its even more successful sequel, subti- tled The Shadow Of Independence, both of which are already in the all- time top ten of domestic product.
Top Line are now also beginning seriously to think big and beyond Russia, and Gribkov proudly shows me an impressive trailer for his new all-action, effects-packed produc- tion, Countdown, co-starring Alexei Makarov, as “a new breed of Russian hero”, and Britain’s Louise Lombard. Filmed in the Caucasus, Moscow, Italy and Tunis, Countdown at $10m will need to have interna- tional ‘legs’.
Bigger budgets are also on the agenda for another production/distri- bution company, Central Partnership, which has been plying its trade since 1997. Responsible for the current num- ber one box-office winner, the terror- ism thriller AntiKiller 2 – and, yes, the original AntiKiller is in at six – they now have a large slate of new films and TV miniseries in development.
They also distribute foreign films like Van Helsing, Love Actually, Winged Migration, The Passion Of The Christ and the upcoming Phantom Of The Opera. But whatever box-office success they have with these potent titles must be tempered by the omnipresent – and seemingly indestructible - threat of VHS and DVD piracy, which is rampant.
As CP’s Mark Lolo points out, on the first day of Van Helsing’s official theatrical release, it’s likely that half a million copies will have already been pirated. Which makes the film’s $8 mil- lion official cinema box office perform- ance seem even more respectable.
If Russian films are to get an increasing foothold in the domestic market as well as make a mark over-
state-funding and the free market
Photos top: Ivan Dobronravov in The Return: above l-r: Actor/Director Nikita Mikhalkov; Mosfilm Studios; Alexander Novikov of VGIK, Russia’s State Film Institute; A scene from Us
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