LONDON, December 1. /TASS/. Van Goghs, a drama by Russian director Sergey Livnev, won the main prize of the Russian Film Week in UK during a ceremony in London on Saturday night.
The movie tells the story of 52-year-old artist Mark Ginzburg (Aleksey Serebryakov), who arrives from abroad to visit his father Victor (Daniel Olbrychski), a famous conductor diagnosed with a fatal illness.
"This is a film about children and parents, it explores on of the most serious aspects of our life, because relations between a child and his parents determine his whole future life, his relations with own children, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters and anyone else," Livnev told TASS.
He also thanked Polish actor Daniel Olbrychski, who received the festival's Best Actor award, but was not present at the ceremony.
"Olbrychski is an absolutely genius actor, one of the most outstading European actors of his generation, and it was pure pleasure to work with him," he said. "He and Serebryakov - who, in my opinion, is also among the leading actors of his generation - made a great duet."
"I was very surprised to see that the cinema hall was full during yesterday’s screening, and many of them were Britons. The audience’s reaction was very good, lots of good questions were asked, it was very interesting," he said.
The eight-day event celebrates the best of new films from Russian filmmakers worldwide and promotes Russian cinema while bridging the gap between Russian cinematography and the western world. In total, 37 films and 18 short features took part in the festival, which culminated with the Golden Unicorn Award on Saturday night.