Koktebel

Programme Notes

The Filmmakers

Boris Khlebnikov & Alexei Popogrebsky - Directors & Screenwriters

Born in 1972, Boris Khlebnikov graduated from Film Theory Department of the Russian Film Institute (VGIK).
Alexei Popogrebsky was also born in 1972 and graduated from the Psychology Department
of the Moscow State University.

Together they wrote and directed the documentary film, 'Mimokhod', in 1997 (16 mm b/w; 21 min) and the short fiction, 'Tricky Frog', in the year 2000 (35 mm color.; 20 min). KOKTEBEL is their first feature length film.

KOKTEBEL was first conceived in 1995. First draft was completed in 1998. In May of 2000, writers/directors Khlebnikov and Popogrebsky and director of photography Berkeshi set off on an expedition along the route of the protagonists from Moscow to the eponymous town at the Crimean Peninsula in order to gather additional material and search for locations. Covering 4,000 km of country roads and sleeping in a tent, they took pictures of landscapes and people of rural Russia and Ukraine. 2 more expeditions followed in 2001 and 2002.

Boris Khlebnikov and Alexei Popogrebsky are part of the Russian New Wave of young directors and their script won the European Pitch Point Event in Berlin in 2001. At the Moscow Film Festival in 2003 the completed film won the Grand Prize as well as the FIPRESCI Award and at the Karlovy Vary festival it won the Phillip Morris Prize.

The film was shown in Toronto, Pusan, Palm Springs, Berlin (Forum) and Sofia, as well as Cannes, where it showed as FIPRESCI REVELATION OF THE YEAR 2003 in the Critics' Week, chosen as 'best of the best' among the young filmmakers for 'its depth and variation of characters, its rich humour, its subtle interweaving of spirituality, its clever script and its mature classical direction.'

Reviews

TWO figures trudge through a stark Russian winterscape in Koktebel. Rain spits down on them intermittently, and the days have the kind of blue-grey, half-lit chill that makes the bones ache. For the father, every step of this journey is a reminder of how far he has fallen, the presence of the small, stoic figure by his side confirming his failings as a parent.
For his 11-year-old son, however, the journey is one of hope. He doesn't mind that they have no money to travel comfortably, he is impatient to reach their destination - a resort on the coast of the Black Sea - and a new life.

This being a Russian film where real men have few words, not much of this is expressed out loud by either of the main characters, but it's an eloquent piece of storytelling from the first-time directors Boris Khlebnikov and Aleksei Popogrebsky.
An immediate and obvious comparison to draw would be with The Return, another Russian drama released this year. Both films focus on the relationship between fathers and sons, both take the form of a journey through damp, unwelcoming Russian countryside. But while the father in The Return is a brusque authorita rian with a face as hard as a hammer, Koktebel's father is a weak, bruised man fighting a losing battle against alcoholism.

He succumbs to the lure of the vodka at the house of an old man whose roof they are fixing to earn a few roubles. While his son sits in the attic, reading, his father is soon checking bottles to see if there is a mouthful of drink left in them. The son doesn't seem too surprised by this turn of events. He is resourceful and self-sufficient; you suspect from the sidelong glances thrown his way that the father knows his child is stronger than he is.

The only time we see a chink in the boy's impassive front is when his father's resolve falters, and he suggests that they should postpone their journey to stay a few months in the house of a woman they encounter along the way. The boy walks a safe distance away from the house and then dissolves into hot, angry tears. But even as he weeps, he cautions himself, trying to check this unwelcome outburst. We can only guess what kind of a life he has led that has left him so tough and controlled.

It's an impressive film, with subtly persuasive performances - I particularly liked Vladimir Kucherenko's demented turn as the poetry-quoting old man, driven half-mad by loneliness and cheap spirits. One has to wonder, though, just what market this damp, bleak film will find during the festive season.

Out of Time

The feature debut of co-directors, Boris Khlebnikov and Alexei Popogrebsky, both in their early thirties, Koktebel is a Russian road movie and a father-and-son story in a tradition that goes back to Chaplin's The Kid.

It begins with a long-held shot of a culvert under a road from which eventually a man and a young child emerge into a cold, gloomy day. They jump a train going south, riding in an empty boxcar. At a brief stop in the countryside, there's a moment of panic as the man leaves the train to pick apples and just manages to make it back. A seemingly threatening railway official turns out to be kindly. Only gradually do we learn they're a penniless father and his 12-year-old son, making a journey from Moscow to the eponymous Crimean town on the Black Sea, once a celebrated hang-out for writers and intellectuals and famous, apparently, as a place for gliding, which becomes a metaphor for freedom. The father is a widowed aero-engineer who's taken to drink after his wife's death and wants to take the boy to his sister-in-law.

The atmosphere is oddly timeless or, at least, out-of-time. There's a distance between the lad and his father that is increased as the man takes to drink again when they're given shelter in exchange for repairing a farmer's roof. This sojourn ends when the farmer accuses the father of theft and wounds him in a drunken rage.

A woman doctor, presumably a war widow, cares for the man and becomes his lover. The disgusted boy wants to complete the journey rather than spend the winter on the woman's smallholding and leaves to hitch a ride down south.
This is a deliberate, slow-moving film. There's little talk, scarcely any formal exposition and images that intrigue without ostentatiously attracting attention. The austerity leaves questions in the air of the sort raised by the films of another elliptical, minimalist Russian film-maker, Alexander Sokurov, especially in his recent, not dissimilar Father and Son. But it has an integrity and a patience that bring to mind the contemplative cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky and the lyrical compassion of Italian neo-realism as practised by De Sica and the early Fellini. One inevitably suspects that an allegory about present-day Russia is lurking here.

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