Roma Liberov. Sohrani moyu rech navsegda 15 July 2023

A screening of Keep My Speech Forever and a meeting with Roma Liberov.

ROMA LIBEROV

"Save my speech forever for the taste of misery and smoke,
For the tar of circular patience, for the conscientious tar of labour..."

Roma Liberov calls Save My Speech Forever "a collective dream about Osip Mandelstam. "It's an essay for the cinema with an audience. A spirited film," says the director.

The shooting of the film lasted 2.5 years and took place in Athens, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Heidelberg, Voronezh, Vladivostok, Moscow, Tver and St. Petersburg. The authors tried to reproduce the whole topography of Mandelstam's life.

Here are Roma's reflections on the film and the process of making it:

"We have no right to be boring, because Osip Mandelstam himself was not boring. To achieve diversity, to reflect the poet's life, we have to see everything with our own eyes. So we filmed at the Sorbonne, in that old auditorium, in that library.

Or this: "And I spent two hundred days in the land of Saturdays, Which is called Armenia..." Of course, one of the episodes had to be filmed in Armenia.

What happens next with the footage? They saturate the frame with colour, cut it, overlay it with animation... All this is done in order to create a gap between reality and art, to achieve the desired degree of conventionality, to get away from documentaries.

There is one more interesting feature. The film employs a strong cast: Inna Churikova, Chulpan Khamatova, Miriam Sekhon, Yevgeny Steblov, and Viktor Sukhorukov as Mandelstam. In total, over the recreation of the biography of the poet worked a few dozen excellent actors. But none of them will not appear in the frame.

The film "Keep My Speech Forever" is the story of Osip Mandelstam, recreated at the junction of arts and genres: documentaries, puppet theatre, design, computer graphics.

The film will be presented in Nice on the 15th of July by its creator, director Roma Liberov.

Roma Liberov is a director, screenwriter and producer. He is the author of films about Brodsky, Dovlatov, Mandelstam, Olesha, Ilf and Petrov, Platonov, the producer of the albums "After Russia", the album and film "Save My Speech Forever" dedicated to Mandelstam. 24 artists, including Leonid Agutin, Ilya Lagutenko, Noize MC, and Oxxymiron, took part in the production of Save My Speech Forever, based on poems by Osip Emilievich.