Gagarinland

Gagarinland is a documentary comedy with elements of the absurd and the grotesque, shot for French television by director Vladimir Kozlov.

Awards

Best feature film “Russian open festival of author's documentary film“ ARTDOKFEST “, Moscow (Russia), 2011”. Prize "Kinoglaz".

Notes

Member, more than 20 international festivals.

Shown via TLT (Toulouse), Histoire (France) and 24 Dock (Russia).

Film making history

In 2002, the director of the film met Natalia Gagarina, the niece of Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin . She was the one who helped to make contact with the relatives of the cosmonaut. Arriving in the city of Gagarin, V. Kozlov met the Directorate of the united museums of Y. Gagarin, the city administration and the second niece of the first cosmonaut - Tamara Dmitrievna Filatova, a museum worker. An idea arose to make a film about the children of Yu. A. Gagarin. But, unfortunately, the two daughters of Y. Gagarin, Elena and Galina, flatly refused to participate in the filming. Then the idea arises: to make a film about the city itself and its extraordinary inhabitants. Thanks to the help of the mayor’s office of Gagarin, the central characters were found quickly. All of them - the poet Mikhail Chekusov, singer Anatoly Fedotov and the keeper of the memory of his famous uncle Tamara Filatov - are honorary residents of the city. The selfless service of the memory of the first hero of the cosmos has become their life’s work. But in some cases, excessive veneration takes bizarre forms bordering on the absurd. In other cases, the name of Yuri Gagarin, becomes a “brand”, a trademark, bringing income, both to individuals, and opening the way for direct investments in the city’s poor treasury.

Interesting Facts

Formally, “Gagarinland” is considered a documentary film, but there are a number of artistic, mostly grotesque scenes that did not exist in real life, built by the director and written by the author. The heroes believe in the “proposed circumstances” so much, in their words and actions, that the invasion of production films happens unnoticed, even for the professional eye.

The film was shot three and a half years for the TLT television channel of the city of Toulouse and with the participation of the History channel by the film company Les Docs du Nord from the city of Lille with a limited budget. Filming began in March 2008, then the project was frozen due to lack of funding. And only in March 2010, thanks to the accession of another film company Les films de la Castagne from Toulouse and financial assistance from the two regions, filming resumed and lasted another six months. But the last shots of the film at the monument to Yuri Gagarin, due to the complete lack of funds, were shot on a semi-amateur camera with a resolution of Full HD.

The total amount of material shot by the two cameras exceeded one hundred hours, so several colorful characters were left out of the film due to its duration limited to one and a half hours.

“Gagarinland” is the name of the holiday village near the village of Klushino, where Yuri Gagarin was born. The construction of this residence for Muscovites, slightly above the middle class, was the basis of the film and gave it a name. Initially, it was supposed to arrange a helicopter-airfield, a church, a network of specialized shops, sports facilities on this site. Initially, the organizers of the complex offered expensive prefabricated Finnish houses to buyers, right down to wooden palaces, but after the economic crisis, they began to build country houses in Russia, and the very idea of ​​Gagarinland lost its status as a luxury residence. And from such a central "character" had to be abandoned, but not from the name implying the city of Gagarin, as a fabulous Soviet country, where time stopped in the 60s of the XX century.

For technical reasons, the shooting from the delta flying machine (and the hero, his pilot) was abandoned: the car vibrated too much and the angle of the shooting was too limited due to the suspended floats (design hydraulics).

In the script it was assumed that Yuri Gagarin would be visible and unexpectedly present in some episodes of the film. He seemed to have come to see what happened to his friends, relatives and the city, after his death in 1968, when Gzhatsk became known as Gagarin. The inlay of the black and white phantom of Yuri Gagarin in color HD video texture was impossible due to the low budget, as was the stylization of the image of the film for the Svema film with its specifically “Soviet” color rendition spectrum.

In the film, for the first time in the cosmonautics kinetic, footage from Yuri Gagarin, shot without sound on a 35 mm film behind the wheel of a black Volga (footage from RGANTD, Moscow) was used.

The original music for the film was written by French composer Nicolas Débar, based on two songs popular in the city, the authorship of which could not be established. The well-known French balalaika master Misha Cherkassky took part in the recording of the phonogram.