Sergei Dvortsevoy

 
 

what seemed interesting were the images, the glimpses of reality where you could see people doing something, I was more interested in how people behaved rather than what they had to say.


I like fiction very much. When you create every piece of something, you see that it's a parallel life. Of course, you understand that it's made of nothing. Actors have played for you, but it's what you have thought up in the kitchen, in fact, with friends or just by yourself, but you see that in this life there is something very serious. You catch something, you can tell something very serious, sometimes stronger than in documentary.”

I propose for the audience to live with people, not to follow every second of the story but also sometimes to breathe with them and feel like you live with them in real time. That’s why I have these long takes. It gives the possibility for people to be inside the picture. Not only to be a spectator watching something entertaining but also to live this life, to feel the dust, to feel the wind and all the physical reality.”

Filmography

Paradise (1996)

Bread Day (1998

Highway (1999)

In the Dark (2004)

Tulpan (2008)

About


Links

IMDB - for a comprehensive filmography and some external links

You Tube - interview, trailers, downloads ...

The Guardian - an interview/profile by Pawel Pawilkowski

GreenCine - Dvortsevoy and his producer, Karl Baumgartner talk to David D’Arcy about Tulpan

Reverse Shot- An interview with Jeff Reichert about he making of Tulpan

Cinetology - Australia’s Luke Buckmaster interviews Dvortsevoy in Melbourne

Cinema Scope - Adam Nayman’s review/profile/interview

Born in Kazakhstan, Sergei Dvortsevoy’s first love was football.  He was dedicated to the sport from the age of ten went to a speciial sports school and tried out for a team, but injury put paid to this ambition.  Instead he worked as a flight radio engineer with Aeroflot for nine years, before responding to an advert for trainee directors at a Moscow film school, even though he had not previously had any interest in film.  He says that he found his style, by discovering what he didn’t like - the standard Soviet documentary of the time.  He began by making documentaries - In the Dark was his last, but gradually began to feel uncomfortable using people’s lives for his own purposes - to the extent that they sometimes suffered for it.  And so he turned to fiction and Tulpan which “was a balancing act between the accidental poetry of his documentaries and the needs of drama and plot.” (Pawel Pawilkowski)