Sergey Ursulyak and Gennady Ostrovsky, the scriptwriter of The Righteous Man, recently had a chance to work on the jury of the Kinoproba student film festival in Yekaterinburg, when they had a break in their busy schedule. Ursulyak did not shoot full-length films for a long time. The last work – “Long Farewell” based on the prose of Yuri Trifonov – was on the big screen in 2004.
“Righteous” is a strange zigzag in my life,” says Sergey Ursulyak. – After many years of work on television and serials, I returned to the rolling picture, although I swore not to do this again. Now directors everywhere go into serial production, as film distribution is more focused on youth and entertainment. I work equally responsibly on any picture, I do not change the vector of my own aspirations, adjusting to the expectations of the audience. Why did I get carried in this direction again? Do not even know. Probably a good story. It is about how in 1942 in Belarus, political instructor Nikolai Kiselev was given the task of bringing Jews who had escaped from the ghetto and escaped death to our territory. For this, he traveled more than a thousand kilometers. Those whom Kiselev brought out, as you understand, were not people of military age. These are mostly old people, women, children. He brought them out without losing so many people. The survivors gave offspring, which annually gathers in May and honors Kiselyov. During his lifetime, he did not tell this story. It was told by those whom he saved. Kiselev had a very modest life. He did not receive the promised title of Hero of the Soviet Union. Due to various circumstances that followed the war, he hid the very fact of saving so many Jews. Nobody knew about his exploits. Now he is the righteous man of the world.”
In 2013, in honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Kiselev, those whom he saved as children came to MK. Shimon Hevlin came from the USA. He was 14 years old when Kiselev took the Jews out of the front line. In 2013, despite his advanced age, this miraculously escaped death continued to volunteer at the Miami Holocaust Museum. It was difficult to talk to him. He cried all the time, remembering the experience. By the time we met in Moscow, Leon Rubin had not been in Russia for more than 50 years. For many years he lived in Israel and no longer spoke Russian very well, he forgot the words. During the war years, when Kiselev saved him, he was six years old. In our interview, Leon Rubin recalled: “The Germans killed the Jews like beetles. I was a child, but I understood everything as an adult. We lived in the Dolginov area, where a partisan detachment operated. People who fled the Jewish ghetto hid in the forest. The partisan command decided to take everyone behind the front line and entrusted this to political instructor Nikolai Kiselev. We walked at night, in silence. There were fascists everywhere, and any loudly spoken word, the cry of a child could destroy us. Of the 270 people, 218 survived.”
“Righteous Man” is the working title of the painting, says Sergey Ursulyak. “It was quite hard work. For three months we sat in the Belarusian forest. Production dates have been pushed back due to covid. In general, we have lost a huge number of artists during the pandemic. Most deaths are believed to be related to cancer and heart disease. But personally, I did not lose as many friends and acquaintances from them as from covid. The pandemic has changed our plans. Instead of shooting from July to September, we sat in the forest from August to November, which changed life a lot.”
In 2008, documentary filmmaker Yuri Malyugin filmed “Kiselyov’s List”, naming his film by analogy with the film “Schindler’s List” by Steven Spielberg. She was shown on television, she participated in festivals, but the name of Kiselyov still remained little known. Sergei Ursulyak admitted that he learned about him from the producers who offered him to make a film. Then I already looked at Kiselyov’s List. Ursulyak always has a long preparatory period. He insists on this, starting to work. “I spend six months carefully studying the materials with my group. We find people who lived at the time that interests us, go to museums, those places where events took place, watch films made at that time, chronicles, read books. This is not meditation, but stupid reading of a large number of books, sometimes about people unknown to me, with an extract of the necessary information. It could be related to the war and the 90s that I knew in which I lived.”
Nikolai Kiselev, who became the hero of The Righteous, is from Bashkiria and lived most of his life in Moscow. He himself escaped from captivity, in the 41st he ended up in the occupied territory, got into a partisan detachment near the village of Dolginovo. By order of the partisan command, he brought 218 people over the front line, having traveled more than one and a half thousand kilometers. In 2005, Kiselyov was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations” in Israel. Every year on June 5, on the day of the last execution in the Dolginovsky ghetto, the descendants of the people he saved gather in Tel Aviv.
Gennady Ostrovsky wrote the script for The Righteous Man based on the memoirs of participants in those events and their relatives. And Ursulyak shoots not only a terrible and painful movie, but also a light one, where there will be humor and lyrics, as he himself says. Everything is like in life. “In sadness I find something cheerful, and in fun I find sadness. In my nature, by virtue of a particle of Jewish blood, there is no unbridled joy. I definitely need to add something to change the mood.” In this sense, the story of his hero Gotsman in “Liquidation” speaks volumes. The character of Vladimir Mashkov was supposed to die, but the producers were sure that in this way the mood would be spoiled for the viewer, his expectations would be deceived. And Ursulyak “sat between the chairs,” in his own words. Gotzman closes his eyes. The camera pulls away from him. Some people run towards him with joyful faces, and the viewer does not fully understand what happened. “If not for this, then Gotsman would have been buried for sure. And so he seems to be alive, ”such was the trick, according to Ursulyak’s stories.
Choosing the performer of the role of Kiselev, Sergei Ursulyak did not pursue external resemblance, especially since Gennady Ostrovsky wrote a fantasy and poetic script. For Ursulyak, the measure of truth was important, which, in his understanding, is personified by the wonderful and convincing artist Alexander Yatsenko. The actor himself says this: “For me, my hero is a person who performs a momentary task. He was entrusted with a huge number of people for whom he must be responsible. Perhaps at first it was bleak for him, but during these 1,500 km that they have traveled, he begins to look at many things and at his life in a different way.
Ursulyak knows a lot about actors, he himself studied this profession at the Theater School. Shchukin, worked at the Satyricon Theater with Konstantin Raikin. “It is important to choose those who fit the roles, who you like,” he says of the principles of his work. – You need to look at them where they are free, see their work in the theater, and not in the studio, where they want you as a director to like it. It is important to create such an atmosphere on the set that the actor is not afraid to play unsuccessfully, would have the right to make a mistake. With an iron understanding of what you want, there should be some kind of optionality that allows you to laugh joyfully if the artist made a slip in the same place in several takes. All this creates freedom. It is necessary to take good artists and not to play in your own films. The Righteous Man starred well-known but mostly unknown actors. Another Jew is played by Sergei Makovetsky. Chulpan Khamatova and Kostya Khabensky starred in episodic roles. They had literally one shooting day each. Fedor Dobronravov has a small role. Played by Zhenya Tkachuk. Lots of great young artists. I go to graduation performances. When I am invited to head the examination committees that issue diplomas, I always agree. Therefore, in “Quiet Flows the Don” and “Bad Weather” there are a large number of debutants taken directly from the incubator. Students from the Moscow Art Theater School and the Shchukin School are also filming in The Righteous. I had to take a large number of Jews out of the forest, so I invited non-professional artists, whom I use minimally and only in roles that require typicality, and not performing complex tasks.
By the way, Sergei Ursulyak recently agreed to teach at VGIK, whose leadership offered him to bring to graduation the course of Vladimir Menshov, from whom he himself studied at the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors. And then how things will go.
It is now rare for anyone to shoot on film. Ursulyak was the last of the Mohicans in this sense. “I held on to the last,” he says. “But we shot the modern part of Bad Weather on digital, and all the retro part on film. A young cameraman worked at Righteous (Mikhail Milashin, a graduate of Vadim Yusov’s workshop at VGIK, filmed the films Fire, Ice, World Champion. – S.Kh.), and I asked him what we would shoot for. This is largely the choice of the operator. We discussed film for a long time, but agreed on digital in many respects. Lenses of this level were ordered! I like the image, although I still think film is better.”
When Ursulyak is asked how he “has an idea”, they talk about “his work”, he immediately reduces it all to a joke: “Everything is simpler. I don’t have ideas. I’m not a female. I just think about things sometimes. I don’t “do art”, I just work. Sometimes they offer me something. But I myself suggested The Quiet Flows the Don to the producers. I read it in the eighth grade, lying in the hospital, and he lived in me all this time. “Life and Fate” was offered to me, and for a long time I refused, believing that everything on this topic had already been discussed. But I read the first draft of Volodarsky’s script and realized that this is the story of my family – evacuation, occupation, my grandfather is a tanker, and agreed. “Bad weather” was our mutual choice. After finishing The Quiet Flows the Don, I took a lot of books and left to read them. Among them was Ivanov’s Bad Weather. I liked the story. It turned out that the rights to the film adaptation had already been bought, but it never occurred to the producers to offer me this material.
Ursulyak does not shoot about modernity. Why this is so, he explained himself: “If I felt today, then I would shoot something about it. But I run away at least 15 years ago, so as not to touch it. For me, our time is devoid of charm. I refer to the material in which I understand the coordinate system, I know what is good and what is bad. Whom to believe today, whom to lean against? Do not know. I have a narrow inner circle – these are relatives, friends. Let the young and sinewy talk about today’s problems.