Description
The life and work of two well-known Leningrad documentarists, Pavel Kogan and Lyudmila Stanukinas, are best expressed by a stanza of Tsvetaeva’s. They became the subjects of this film, which their pupil Viktor Kossakovsky shot in the last months of Pavel Kogan’s life. For Lyudmila Stanukinas — Lyalya to those close to her — her husband remained the sole meaning of existence. She stayed with him to the end and sustained his fading life as best she could.
About the director:
Viktor Kossakovsky
Viktor Kossakovsky was born in Leningrad on 19 July 1961. An independent filmmaker, his films have received more than a hundred awards at Russian and international festivals. The subjects and objects of his work vary widely, but his cinematic style is always marked by a poetic and artistic interpretation of reality.
In 1978 he began work at the Leningrad Studio of Documentary Film as a camera assistant, assistant director and editor. From 1986 to 1988 he studied at the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors. His first feature-length documentary, Losev, was released in 1989; in 1992, after The Belovs, his name became known worldwide. Both films won the Joris Ivens Award and the Audience Award at IDFA in Amsterdam, as well as many other prizes at festivals around the globe.
In 2011 Kossakovsky’s ¡Vivan las Antipodas! opened the Venice Film Festival. In 2018 the premiere of his technically innovative, globe-spanning film on the transformation of water, Aquarela, also took place at Venice; it was later nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and received numerous other awards.
In most of his films Kossakovsky is writer, director, cinematographer and editor. He now lives in Berlin and teaches directing and documentary filmmaking at film schools around the world.