High life on the tectonic break. A story of Lara (photo)

photo by EuroBelarus Information Service

Minsk club “DK” held a premiere of “Larachka in the time of changes” – a second film of the project “The history of Belarus in 1917-1941”.

The project is a series of documentaries about the little-known period in Belarusan history: from revolutions of 2017 to the start of the Great Patriotic War. This is the story about the time, about phenomena, about events, about everything Belarus has been making. Characters are notable people of that age. It is for the audience to decide whether they are heroes or victims of circumstances.

Let us recall that the project started last March with the film “Siarhei Piasetski. Our famous villain” in “Loft café” in Minsk. After a charming villain and fraud suddenly Larysa Aleksandrouskaja, the first singer of the Opera Theatre, was chosen to be the person of the second cycle.

In 2014 year it was 110 years from Aleksandrouskaja’s anniversary.

“Aleksandrouskaja was chosen by Alena Vereshchagina. But I was trying to lessen the amount of explanations I was giving to her; we were rather working together, - told Leanid Kalitsenia, the producer of the film during the premiere. – My idea of the project was to cover the period of 20-30 years of the 20^th century, as well as to show what our TV doesn’t show: the period before the war. For example, the opening of the Opera Theatre – it couldn’t just emerge from nowhere, could it?”

Leanid Kalitsenia claims that “if we understand the pre-war Belarus, we might understand its future”. “I felt that this material is essential; there was merely no demand for it yet”.

The director of the film Alena Vereshchagina says that the biggest impact during the film creation was made by the books of Bengt Jangfeldt, a professor of Slavonic philology in Stockholm University about Vladimir Mayakovsky and Joseph Brodsky: “Unusually interesting research with personal impressions”.

“We also relied on the style of that time – we used Aleksandrouskaja’s diaries, and memoirs of her niece. The film was made a year and a half ago; when the film has appeared, we’ve saw that we are on the same tectonic break between the two epochs”, - marks the director.

Alena was interested how these unusual personalities were behaving in the situations of tough moral choice that almost every citizen experienced at that time, but public and famous personas were the first to do so.

It should be noted that no less than half of the film is dedicated to the modern Minsk rather than Aleksandrouskaja.

“We don’t know many people who were making our history. This is the gap we should cover to feel valuable people”, - sums up Pavel Sviardlou, a journalist, the presenter of the discussion organized after the premiere.