On August 8 the premiere screening of Ukrainian director Eva Neiman’s movie House with a Turret, which won a prize of the international film festival in Karlovy Vary (the Czech Republic), took place in the capital’s cinema Oskar. Journalists and film critics were the first to see the much-talked-of movie, but on August 16 the country’s movie theaters will start to screen the film, in particular, one will be able to see it in Kyiv’s movie theaters Kyiv and Zhovten.
Neiman’s work is an exciting black-and-white psychological movie based on the eponymous autobiographic short story by a Russian writer Fridrikh Gorenshtein. It tells about an eighth-year-old boy, who has to leave the train on his way back from evacuation in winter 1944 because of his mother’s disease. His mother dies in some unknown city, thus he has to mature quickly in a matter of one day. The boy on his own finds a hospital to visit his mother and finds a post-office from which he sends a wire to his grandfather. Trusting in unknown persons, the hero continues to look for his way home, meeting on his way mostly psychologically and morally exhausted, heart-hardened people. A piercing image in the movie is a house with a turret located on a square near a railway station of an unknown city, which becomes for the child the symbol of the place where he lost his dearest person.
“I have been for over 10 years impressed by Fridrikh Gorenshtein’s short story, I reread it now and then,” Eva Neiman told The Day after the premiere. “My personal acquaintance with Fridrikh Naumovich helped me to preserve the author’s spirit of the short story as fully as possible. For a long time I was lacking the main hero in order to imagine what this movie should look like. And then we found nine-year-old Dmytro Kobetsky who studies in a boarding school. I was simply struck with the depth of this child’s eyes.”
Besides Kobetsky, the roles in the movie were played by Ukrainian and Russian actors, such as Albert Filozov, Kateryna Golubieva, Mykhailo Veksler, Vitalii Linetsky, and Maria Politseimako. By fatal coincidence, Kateryna Golubieva, who played the boy’s dying mother, died two months later.
House with a Turret enchants with work of a cameraman which is unusual for the big screen. According to the movie’s director of photography Rimvydas Leipus, the most part of the movie was shot with a portable camera he was carrying on his shoulder. “In this movie I tried to steer clear of my cliche in work. I wanted to surprise and intrigue the audience, mostly by the shooting the scenes from my shoulder,” Rimvydas Leipus told The Day, “I think I have managed to reinforce the reality effect and make the camera a kind of beyond-the-scene text.”
House with the Turret has been funded by 1+1 PRODUCTION, specifically Ihor Kolomoisky. “It is gratifying that the Ukrainian movies are ‘pushed’ to the world market by private Ukrainian investors. It may sound paradoxical today,” director general of the 1+1 group of channels admitted during the presentation, “In my opinion, we have created a good movie and we want the highest number of viewers to see it. It is important for us that the film will be widely screened, specifically in Ukraine. Our further step will be to show it in Russia and other cities, for 1+1 PRODUCTION has signed an agreement with a French distributor concerning the possibility to screen the movie around the world.”
