"This story doesn’t seem real, but you will have to believe it": the director Aleksandr Kott about the film Angels of War

The director Aleksandr Kott, the producers Irina Malysheva and Natalya Katkova, the screenwriter Mikhail Zubko, and the actors Roman Evdokimov and Tikhon Zhiznevskiy intorduced the opening film of the 48th Moscow International Film Festival, Angels of War.

The film is set in November, at the very start of the terrible winter of 1941, when the Siege circle surrounds Leningrad, and a group of young ice yachtsmen ventures onto the ice, still quite weak. Their mission to deliver ammunition turns into a rescue operation to save orphans from a children’s home, because they were not evacuated in time. Former rivals in sailing must now become a true team to survive and give hope to all others.

Aleksandr Kott: "This is a true story no one, including myself, knew about. There is only one book and a few photos online about this detachment of ice yachtsmen; there is no other information: even our history advisor could not find anything. By late autumn 1941, the ice had become so thin that heavy equipment could not move safely; they needed to find a way to deliver cargo, and what I think was an incredibly creative solution came to mind: they remembered the yachtsmen. Nikolay Lyudevig, a real yachtsman and designer, put the yacht on skids, and thanks to this, they could start navigation. These huge white sailboats appeared when, it seemed, there was no more hope. Well, this whole story does not seem real, but it is so, and you will surely have to believe it".

Irina Malysheva: "For any producer, it’s a privilege and an asset to work on a film opening the Moscow International Film Festival. We spent more than three years preparing, filming and post-production, so we hope the audience will enjoy our work".

Natalia Katkova: "We came across the yachtsmen story completely by chance: we knew nothing about this historical fact, and we were surprised it was entirely new. We were convinced many more people should learn about it. There are many war films about tank crews and pilots, but the ice yachtsmen were forgotten, which is not fair, that is why our team decided to put historical records straight".

Mikhail Zubko: "For me, this film sets, in a sense, a new, incredibly high standard. There is a tradition of great Soviet war films, there are excellent modern films on this topic, but Angels of War sits at the crossing of several realities. It’s a sports film where the main characters challenge each other to check who is the best, sometimes in a childish manner, despite the war. It's also a film about the Siege, but we show it not during the terrible peak, which has already been shown in other films, but, literally, during the first two weeks of Leningrad's encirclement. And for me, it was important to show people who are here and now and face the choice of exactly whom to save, in the face of an imminent catastrophe".

Tikhon Zhiznevskiy: "We took a yachting course just for the shooting. We rode in small boats, turned upside down, tried steering them, and then we were shown these completely unimaginable vehicles on skids that can reach an immense speed, since each of them has a bike engine inside. We got mischievous and thrilled, but by the middle of the project we were so much carried away with steering these ice yachts we started crashing everything around. In reality, steering ice yachts is much harder than steering regular yachts, plus you have to take ice thickness into account, which also affects the speed of the ice yacht".