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Film Info

Russia 2013 Director: Boris Khlebnikov
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Project / Host

European Film Awards

A Long and Happy Life

Synopsis

A young farmer named Sasha stands at the beginning of a new, happy life. The state is buying up land from small landowners. For Sasha, this is a chance to escape the potato farm he has grown tired of, and return to the city, taking along his beloved Anna (a clerk in the local land administration department). But once the deal is closed and the farm is doomed, the local villagers suddenly rise up in protest. They convince Sasha, the ‘boss’, to come to their aid and save the farm – the village’s only means of survival. Sasha is touched by the villagers’ eagerness to cast him in the role of a local leader and object of their love and hope. He tries his best to help the villagers. But when he puts the brakes on the transfer of the farm to the state, local officials view it as a symptom of schizophrenia, and his girlfriend takes it as his refusal to share a life in the city with her. Sasha finds himself caught up in a fight which is not his, entangled in a web of passion, pride, and irreversible actions.

Cast & Crew

Director's comment

It all began when I watched, for the umpteenth time, the 1952 American Western HIGH NOON. At some point, just for fun, I came up with a Russian version of the story. At first, I didn’t take it seriously. But for some reason, I gradually came to believe that I could really do this. I wanted to make a full-on, modern-day Western. When we started to study the subject of the story, as we began to visit farms, naturally, the plot and the genre began to fall apart. We were deluged with observations that pulled the story in a completely different direction.

We shot the film in the north, on the Tersky Coast of the White Sea, in the village of Umba in the Murmansk region. The area has a unique natural beauty: pinewoods, cliffs, and small plots of land that used to house farms. It was crucial that we convey the sense that this village is very far from Moscow, that this is a place where the relationship between people and government is more direct.
When I saw the way trees and bushes consume and destroy the deserted farms, I knew this was the perfect location for our shoot. Here, you get a real sense that nature is watching everything we do, that it is stronger than us.

Cast & Crew

Boris Khlebnikov
 Roman Borisevich, Alexandr Kushaev
 Alexander Rodionov, Boris Khlebnikov
 Pavel Kostomarov
 Alexander Yatsenko, Anna Kotova, Vladimir Korobeinikov, Sergey Nasedkin
 Ivan Lebedev
 Maxim Belovolov
 Olga Khlebnikova
 Svetlana Mikhailova
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