Farewell to Cairo

The once happy couple, the nurse Barbara and the fireman Bartholomew, have long lived a mercantile life in which there is no place for love. Bartholomew is busy with business, Barbara and his son fled to Cairo , where they met with George. Barbara has an affair with him.

Some time later, Bartholomew was abducted by order of a certain Gogi, and Barbara and her child fell into the hands of Sekach, who was counting on a solid ransom and closing them in his apartment. Barbara manages to escape, but she is haunted by the deaths of relatives and friends.

Bartholomew also escapes from his guards, while receiving a gunshot wound to his leg. Maria helps him, a woman with a gun, leading a solitary way of life. Bartholomew is again caught and tortured. Maria shoots the bandits. Together with the dead criminals, Bartholomew also dies.

Desperate Varvara comes to the house of George, who turns out to be the same bandit Goga. However, he is also dead. The killer is his mistress, who he used to capture Bartholomew.

• Script writer: Oleg Biima
• Stage Director: Oleg Biima
• Director of photography: Les Zotsenko
• Producer: Igor Tsishkevich
• Director of the film: Lyudmila Starodubtseva

• The film sounds music of Vladimir Gronsky
• In the frames of the film - panoramas of Kiev and Cairo :
  • Embankment in front of Ukrtelefilm
  • Kiev-Pechersk Lavra
  • Housing estate in Obolon
  • St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery
• The filmmakers jokingly call their offspring “protracted”, as the shooting lasted for two years ^[2]

If I hadn’t written the novel “Barbarian Mid-Barbarian”, then, having watched this film, I could have written a new novel. There were a lot of new plot moves in the film, some of the characters in the story I saw were completely different, that is, their plus sign was changed to minus. This is the vision of director Oleg Biyma and yet another proof that literature can do its own thing, and cinema can do its own thing. It is very true said in the credits: “for the motives of the story”, nothing more. I was afraid that a happy end would pop up in which everyone would hug. Thank God this did not happen: tired of these sugary things. Yes, the film is tough, even cruel, but such is the story. And life is probably now like that. My main character, Bartholomew, also dies: trying to cut the chain on himself, he injures his arm and brings the infection. As the author of the story, I am sorry that the image of the Vampire practically disappeared in the film - this character was interesting to me in that, having escaped from a Russian prison, he hid in the Chernobyl zone . Unfortunately, not everyone will understand that forest events occur precisely in this zone and that one of the central figures, Maria, is a self-settlement. There was no such image either in literature or in cinema.

- From an interview with the author of the story Vladimir Yavorivsky after the premiere of the film ^[3]

• In the film, compared to the literary source, Israel is replaced by Cairo ^[3]

• Oleg Biyma: “Commercial cinema never made the weather”