"When I just began working on this piece, I understood that I do not have the right to work with Tolstoy's language": the director Stacy Tolstoy about the film Family Happiness

The director Stacy Tolstoy, the actors Vladislav Tsenev and Mikhail Guray introduced the film Family Happiness participating in the Main Competition of 47 Moscow International Film Festival.

The film, which is based on the eponymous novel by Leo Tolstoy, is a sensitive drama about the complicated and fragile world of conjugal relations. After losing her parents, the young Masha falls in love with her caregiver Sergey Mikhailovich. Masha is young, Sergey Mikhailovich is much older and they will have to come a hard way to understand each other. This is a story about how two people inevitably change when married, illusions are broken and replaced with emerging depth and affection, which they could not even think of before.

Stacy Tolstoy: "When I just began working on this piece, I understood that I do not have the right to work with Tolstoy's language, despite my last name, and that I needed to create an independent piece. This is how I came up with this independent story, which I do not call an adaptation, but rather a film based on the novel. And I wanted to create a "timeless" film (such story could have taken place in the 19th, 17th or 21st centuries) and not to create an artificial distance between the spectator and the screen".

Vladislav Tsenev: "Working with Stacy was joint creation and joint authorship, for which I am very much grateful, as this happens quite rarely. Being so pushy, reaching what you want, setting a task and reaching it: all this is about Stacy!"

Mikhail Guray: "We are great friends with Stacy, but here there was a big difference, as I deeply respect Stacy as a professional director and I greatly respect the material, so there were no friends and acquaintances on the film set, there was just a director and an actor. Sometimes it seems cinema is different from theater, because theater means direct presence, while cinema fixes the moment of magic. In the film, we played as seriously as possible".