The Silver Skates (film)

The Silver Skates
Teaser poster
Directed by	Michael Lockshin
Written by	Roman Kantor
Based on	Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates by Mary Mapes Dodge
Produced by	Pyotr Anurov (ru) Leonid Vereshchagin (ru) Anton Zlatopolskiy (ru) Rafael Minasbekyan Nikita Mikhalkov Grigoriy Stoyalov
Starring	Fedor Fedotov Sonia Priss Aleksei Guskov Yuri Kolokolnikov Severija Janusauskaite Kirill Zaytsev Yuri Borisov
Cinematography	Igor Grinyakin
Production companies	Central Partnership KIT Film Studio Kinoslovo Studio Trite Russia-1 Gazprom Media
Distributed by	Central Partnership
Release date	October 1, 2020 (2020-10-01) (Moscow Film Festival)
Country	Russia
Language	Russian

The Silver Skates (Template:Lang-ru) is a 2020 Russian historical romance adventure drama film directed by Michael Lockshin and written by Roman Kantor. The story is set in a Christmas-time Saint Petersburg, the Russian Empire at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, among ice-covered rivers and canals of the capital seethe with festive activities. Matvey is a young man from a poor lamplighter, fate brings two people together on the holiday streets to be the silver skates, who once met an aristocrat girl named Alisa is an intellectual from a noble family. Since then, the heroes together follow their dreams, based on the novel of the same name. The main roles will be played by the pairs Fedor Fedotov and Sofia Priss, the film also starred Aleksei Guskov, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Severija Janusauskaite, Kirill Zaytsev and Yuri Borisov.

Principal photography lasted from February winter to May spring 2019, and took place in Saint Petersburg, in the palaces of the Grand prince, taking place at Sadovaya Street in the Saint Michael's Castle, as well as on the frozen rivers and canals of the Northern Capital, in the town of Kronstadt, Gatchina and Vsevolozhsk of the Leningrad Oblast, Russia.

Plot

The film takes place in 1899 in St. Petersburg, where absolutely different people meet: the father and son of an ordinary lamplighter, Matvey, who has silver skates, and a daughter of a dignitary named Alisa, who is fond of the world of science. They will help each other realize their dreams...

Cast

• Fedor Fedotov as Matvey
• Sonia Priss as Alisa
• Aleksei Guskov as Nikolai Nikolaevitch
• Yuri Kolokolnikov as Grand prince
• Severija Janusauskaite as Severina
• Kirill Zaytsev as Prince Arkadiy Trubetskoy
• Yuri Borisov as Alex
• Aleksandra Revenko as Margo
• Timofey Tribuntsev as Petr
• Sergey Koltakov as Dmitri Mendeleev
• Yan Reshetnikov as footman
• Denis Lavant as Fourier
• Cathy Belton as Miss Jackson
• Vasiliy Kopeikin as Muha

Production

"These were very difficult half a year of my life, but the memories from the filming were only positive! We have a team of amazing professionals who are incredibly dedicated to the cinema, so even the weekly night shifts with frost and blizzard were surprisingly easy, in a creative atmosphere."

—directed by Michael Lockshin

The director of the picture was the debutant of the full meter Michael Lockshin, a famous clip maker and director of advertising.

Casting

The main roles in the film are debutants - actors Fedor Fedotov and Sonya Priss from St. Petersburg. The company on the screen are the masters and actor of the star: Aleksei Guskov, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Severija Janusauskaite, Kirill Zaytsev, Yuriy Borisov, Aleksandra Revenko, Timofey Tribuntsev, Sergey Koltakov, and also stars of European cinema Denis Lavant and Cathy Belton.

All the actors who had to skate for the role underwent serious training. Fedor Fedotov was a little more fortunate than his colleagues: he had been playing hockey from the age of three, but for the film the actor had to master a completely different, non-hockey, skating style, which took three months of intensive training. Almost all the stunts in the film were performed by Fedor himself.

Filming

Classicism style, "Fountain House" on the Fontanka Embankment of the Fontanka River. (Sonia Priss as Alisa is at home)

The shooting location for the film set began on February 4, 2019, a snowy day in the Leningrad Oblast.

Most of the filming took place on the frozen rivers of the Moyka, Kryukov Canal and Griboyedov Canal in St. Petersburg, in which the cinema has never been filmed in such a volume in the entire history! The film crew built and decorated ice fairs and skating rinks, and when spring began to come into its own, a large-scale decoration of the frozen Moyka River was built in the pavilion to shoot action scenes on ice.

Post-production

The computer graphics for the project will be handled by Alexander Gorokhov's CGF visual effects studio. The volume of graphics will be impressive, because the events of the film unfold at the turn of the century, on the eve of 1900, in winter New Year's Eve in St. Petersburg.

Release

After being postponed by six months, The Silver Skates premiered on the opening night of the 42nd Moscow International Film Festival. The film is scheduled to receive a wide screen release in December 2020.

External links

• The Silver Skates at IMDb