European Films

Alexander Rogozhkin in Karlovy Vary. Portrait by Fabrizio Maltese for europeanfilms.net

Peregon (Transit) is the new film from prolific Russian writer-director Alexander Rogozhkin, which was presented In Competition at this year’s edition of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. Several of his past films have screened there, including Zhizn Idiotom (Life with an Idiot) and the Chechen war drama Blokpost (Check Point), for which he won the Best Director Prize in 1998. Peregon is a story set on a secret military transit base in the remote Chukotka region, where planes from allied forces came in from Alaska, including quite a few with female pilots, which of course attracted the attention of the mostly male Russian crew at the base. Boyd van Hoeij, the editor of europeanfilms.net, met with Peregon’s director during the festival. 

Where did the original idea for Peregon come from?
The idea came to me twenty years ago, but I thought I would do it differently. There were three ways used by the US to aid Russia at the time [during WWII]: through Persia, via the North and through Chucotka, though the Chucotka connection was completely secret, and the first publications about it only appeared at the beginning of the 1990s. I already had a script about this time and these people, but since it would probably have been impossible to shoot it [on location] in Persia, I changed the setting to Chucotka. 

Are the characters complete fictional creations or did you model some of your characters on stories from actual people who worked at such transit bases in WWII?
I read a lot about the subject, but the characters are purely fictional. What surprised me when I was working on the script and doing research in the archives was that the people who worked at the military bases were very young; they were born in 1925 or 1927. In that time, the people who would participate in normal life were killed or hurt in the war. Kurt Vonnegut said of the First World War generation that the war had made them four centimetres shorter...

How did you decide on the structure of the film, which offers a panoramic view of many different characters?
The decision was quite easy, because I love novels and novelists from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Tolstoy, Faulkner, Updike and Dostoyevsky. In fact, I would call my film a “film novel”. Tom Woolfe, writing about Faulkner, said that the story is like a postage stamp: it is not the story that is important, but the inner life of the characters. I was very happy to be able to write about them, and I wrote the film as if it were a novel. The producers hate it, because they always want something shorter and when they translated the script in English, it became even longer: almost twice as long as in Russian! The film is a bit longer than originally planned, though. If I were more talented the film would have been shorter! [Laughs.] 

There is small murder mystery in the second half of the film. While the first half is an impressionistic portrait of the characters, when the murder investigation begins, the storytelling becomes more rigid because it demands a form in which such things can be properly resolved.
I did this on purpose, creating a more impressionistic first part in which things pass as in life and are not really organised. Then, when the investigator arrives and he starts his investigation and tries to understand what happened, we start to organise the material. It is then that [the audience] starts understanding who is who, what their various relationships to each other are, and how some have a different, second life hidden behind the first one. It thus shows you that very often, things on the surface seem very different from how they truly are: you see a person from one side, and then you suddenly see this person as someone completely different. Good people become bad, bad people become better, some turn out to be informers though you never expected them to be. As a director, I tried to be a provocateur, trying to get the audience to participate, let them make their own decisions and also let them change their point of view about certain characters, as happens in real life. 

Would you say that the film is patriotic?
Yes, I do think it is a patriotic film, but not only for the Russian people but for all the allies who helped each other during WWII. In Russia, we differentiate between “kvasnoy”, which is a very superficial, simple kind of patriotism and real patriotism, and this film would belong in the latter category. What is interesting for me as an artist is that, of course, it is very bad that people participate in and kill each other during wars, but at the same time, I can show and admire that even in the worst circumstances, a human being can remain a human being. 

Have you got an idea of the Russian public’s reaction, even though the film came out in Russia only this week?
It will be interesting to see their reaction to this kind of film. During the Soviet era, it was said that we were the most literature-oriented and -reading people in the world, but now we say that Russian people do not like to read, at least not those who go to the cinema. They are a lot of subtitles in this film: some dialogue is in American English, some in the native language of Chukotka [which is not related to Russian] and there is no voice-over, so it will be interesting to see how the audience will react. It is a time in which simple stories seem to prevail, where everything moves along predictable lines and there are just two characters who meet on a train or in a plane. Of course these stories can be made interesting as well, but it seems that people do not want to work hard to make their stories more interesting.

Could you talk a bit about your new film?
I am currently writing the script for a film set in the eleventh century. It is now set in Russia, but it will probably be changed to Norway and Constantinople. It is about the great movements of the tribes and will take a long pre-production time. In the meantime, I might do something simpler [in terms of production], a contemporary story.

Director portraits (c): Fabrizio Maltese for europeanfilms.net, 2006. Special thanks to Raisa Fomina of Peregon’s sales agent Intercinema XXI Century for the translation from the Russian.

Related items: 

>>Peregon (Transit) media gallery with stills from the film.

>>Peregon photo diary gallery with portraits of the director and star Daniil Strahov