by P.Lutsik and A.Samoryadov Directed by Yekaterina Granitova, RAMT, Moscow 2015
It was my third opportunity to work together with Yekaterina, this time with a totally different kind of material. Lutsik and Samoryadov were two cult figures in Russian cinema after the crash of communism, with their crazy stories of newfound freedom. This one never made it into a film, but it is perhaps the craziest of them all: several Siberian smugglers undertake to deliver spirits to Chukchi people, encounter all kinds of adventures including a clash with a wannabe local king, and finally stumble over the border into the US in foul weather… Of course, the story does not stop there, but becomes even wilder. This is a very masculine tale, and you can imagine us two women standing before a dozen or more of extremely virile actors whom we had to push around. We also had live music on the scene, with original scores specially written for this production by Pyotr Nalich, a talented and well-known musician, who performed them himself with his band.
