Zhit (Living) (2012)

 

Is life more than a predictable chain of aminoacids?
Is there such thing as fate? 

 

A person can feel, suffer, love and live out its destiny, even when this means losing what is for them the most precious item: their loved ones.

In “Living” we watch as fate takes their loved ones swiftly and brutally. Faith  removes any reason for them to live, or even the desire to stay alive.

The film is an existential portrait of people living in a remote  Russian province, during one harsh winter.

 

A mother wants to reunite with her twin daughters.

A young couple marry in church. Immediately after the ceremony, God or the Devil or  Fate  tests their love in the most brutal way.

 

A solitary boy wants to see his estranged father, despite his mother's violent protests.

 

 

Each of these characters lives through their own ordeal.

 

Among all the sorrows imaginable, Sigarev focuses on the most devastating: DEATH.

 

 

Without any pathetism, but with brutal sincerity, he achieved here a very personal and  crafted film on the complexity of LIVING.

“Living” stars Mr. Sigarev’s wife, Yana Troyanova, an actress who manages to be simultaneously repugnant and luminous.

 A prominent author of extremely truthful plays written in the tradition of 'new drama', Sigarev takes his art a few steps further by meticulously depicting the bleak routine of everyday life, while at the same time searching for something hidden beneath its surface.

  

He tackles here a fundamental question: Is there catharsis in life, and therefore in art?

If so, can our sorrows be healed?

And if not, how can one escape despair and go on living?

We have here a mystery that transforms this 'realistic' film into a universal parable, revealing for a miracle.

 

Sigarev was born in 1977, in Upper Salda, Sverdlovsk Oblast. He studied at the Nizhny Tagil Pedagogical Institute and graduated from the Yekaterinburg Theatre Institute.^[Sigarev has directed two films, Volchok, which was made in 2009 and which he adapted from his own play, and Zhit (Living) (2012). He also wrote the screenplay for Prodayotsya detektor lzhi (2005), which is based on his lays Detektor lzhi and Fantomnye boli.

 

Directed by
Vasili Sigarev

Sound Department
Ivo Heger	....	sound re-recording mixer

Production Companies

Koktebel Film Company

Distributors

Utopia Pictures (2012) (Russia) (all media)

Giulia D