DA CANNES ALLE SBARRE. UNA TESTIMONIANZA DI PAVEL NAZAROV

Vitalij Kanevskij

Vitali Evgen’evic Kanevsky 

(Vladivostok, Russia, 1935)

Kanevsky’s father, a musician of Polish origin, died prematurely when he was hit in the forehead by a stray bullet during WWII. Thus, at seven years of age, young Vitali found himself living in the Siberian city of Sucan (later renamed Partizansk following the elimination of Chinese names in the territory of Primorsky Kraj, the Maritime Territory, in 1972), after his mother decided to move there in search of better opportunities for herself and her children. After spending a few years at school, Kanevsky left the city and went off to seek his fortune in Nikolaevsk-na-mure, where he divided his time between factory work and night school and completed a course to become a specialized welder. He then began his long military service. In 1960, he enrolled at VGIK (the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography) but shortly before receiving his degree, in 1966, he was accused of sexual assault and arrested. Despite the fact that the charges proved to be unfounded, he spent eight years in a prison camp. In 1974, after being released from prison, his friend Vasily Shukshin, a filmmaker, author and artist, helped him get back into VGIK and to find work as an assistant at Bielarus’fil’m in Minsk. There, Kanevsky made Sekret Cetvërtij, an episode of the TV series Po sekretu vsemu svetu, and thus was able to receive his diploma from VGIK in 1977. That same year, he moved to Leningrad, where he worked for Lenfil’m, not without difficulty. In 1989, he made Freeze, Die, Come to Life, which was presented at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival and received the Caméra d’or. He next collaborated with the French producer Philippe Godeau and made An Independent Life; a sequel of his preceding film, it was selected to compete in Cannes in 1992. That same year, the French Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, named him “Chevalier des arts et des letters.” In 1994, he made the documentary Nous, les enfants du XX siècle and, in 1999 and in 2002, two other documentaries about the new reality of post-Soviet Russia: Kto Bol’še and À l’automne d’une nouvelle vie. In 2005, he wrote the screenplay of a fiction feature film, Znak Sud’by [t.l. Sign of destiny], which was published in 2006 in the Russian Film Almanac, nr. 6. In 2009, he finished the script for the seven episodes of a TV series in collaboration with the screenwriter Eduard Volodarskij, who has supported Kanevsky right from the beginning of his career. He spends his time between Saint Petersburg and Paris, where, since 1992, he lives and works with his wife Varvara Krasil’nikova, who has collaborated on almost all his films, and with their daughter Katja.