Ovsyanki or Silent Souls, another title In Competition for Golden Lion statue at this year's Venice Film Festival.
This time, we're here to present you a movie that comes from a Russian director Aleksei Fedorchenko that is already being described as “melancholy drama relates the journey of a man and his companion, who travel to a river with the remains of his companion's late wife.”
Here's the Silent Souls synopsis: “After a man's young wife dies suddenly (the cause is never disclosed) he enlists the help of a colleague in disposing of the body in accordance with the local custom.
The characters here are Meryar, descendants of a 400-year-old Finnish tribe once native to that part of western Russia, but now all but forgotten. They have different and non-traditional names for places and people, but most strikingly different are their rituals to do with marriage and death and the expression of grief.”
Director Fedorchenko said: “The slogan of the film was tenderness. We wanted tenderness to be transformed into nostalgia; tenderness and nostalgia were to become synonymous with love” and added:
“This feeling, this representation of the Merjan, was something we felt the whole time were staying in that region. Also the names of the rivers bring us back to the Merja 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.”
Screenplay is written by Denis Osokin, and the movie is based on a novel by Aist Sergeyev.
Produced by Igor Mishin, Mary Nazari, movie stars Igor Sergeyev, Yuri Tsurilo, Yuliya Aug, Ivan Tushin and Viktor Sukhorukov.
