Natalya Bogdanovskaya

Choosing studying in France above any other country had to do with my professional ambitions: this country is the motherland of cinema. So by the time I’ve decided to add directing skills to my TV journalist experience, opting for Paris school seemed like a logical stage of my evolution.

I’ve noticed a tendency among my French counterparts: there’s a belief that it’s easier to carry out one’s projects in America. One quite successful director was once telling me in astonishment how he spent a year and a half in vain, struggling to push his film through at home, and how it took him five minutes at a festival in Canada to get an offer that made him pack up all his stuff right away and move across the ocean.

There are certain rules that have become common practice in the West which I wouldn’t accept under no circumstances: say, sometimes, the director “is not allowed” access to the editing table. This, undoubtedly, has a positive side to it, but I personally wouldn’t even bother starting the work. I lose interest in a film once it’s being edited by someone else.

Morning usually finds me at the editing computer. To me those are the best sunrises. This means that I’ve managed to adopt the appropriate mode for working on a sequence. One thing to hinder this process though is the demands of the body longing for a bit of sleep till noon at least …

I’ve got a lot of favourite jewellery pieces. There used to be even more. Until I convinced myself that most of them are more of an adornment for my jewellery box than for me… After that the “passive stock” was moved out to stay with my friends.

What bewilders me about Moscow is the concentration of glamour and its imitations. Actually, if you look deeper, all of it is merely an imitation… Like a prison, something that people in the West have long got over and taken to pieces. A kind of a feverish yearning to stick to some appearance standards, especially in women. Hair of certain length and colour, legs, skirt, lips of certain size, breasts… seems like women are worried about hurting men’ feelings with their individuality. The French have some mean jokes about big cars and certain complexes of their owners… I wish people in Russia knew what it is all about…

I don’t have a car in Moscow, and being a film director I find fascination of a very particular sort in those public transport trips. I keep telling my friends the anecdote how someone “nearly killed” me with a door in a subway which people in France tend to always hold for you. I also add some observations on extraordinary discourtesy, things like: “Can’t you read or what?!” For the French that would be something really exotic, and then again, coming from a woman, this would be explained by quite unflattering problems in her love life… Maybe that’s the reason why to avoid being labelled under some unfavourable category people overseas so often resort to social smiles?

The Western bourgeois society is more mature. It has already been through many “infantile” diseases. They’ve developed respect for human dignity, human rights. They’ve got science, education… The mere idea of buying a degree in a subway passage will never cross one’s mind — they enter universities and study there till they’re blue in the face.

A French woman, unlike one depicted by a legend (once this cliché is still popular), in her everyday life bears no trace of “exquisite style” in the way she presents herself through her attire. They wear whatever feels comfortable to them. A dress with sneakers, a classic jacket with a backpack… Only Russian women battle with their ten-centimetre heels in the sands of the beaches of the French Riviera. One rarely meets a person who’d be excessively concerned with his status, when a dress matters more than a man wearing it. Jeans and a T-shirt are common for film screenings. No security with their dress code.

When I had to go for a shoot in Moscow, they told me that there was going to be a “dress code”: a suit, high heels… So I had to make my point clear: I could either wear high heels or make a quality shoot.

I don’t have any geographical preferences regarding a place to live. I’d be anywhere provided I could find self-fulfilment. Like Tsvetaeva once said: “My homeland is everywhere, once there is a table, a window and a tree by that window”.

My film “The Blind Photographer” uncovers the curious, dreadful, maybe, story of a man who was born sighted but suffered complete loss of vision when he was 12. When I first came to interview him, it felt like… a joke, a hoax of some kind. That’s how much he’s achieved through those 50 years that he’s been struggling to adapt to his condition, that’s how hard he was trying to hide his defect, his disability… During the shoot the only condition he made was to abstain from drawing any parallels with disability. If there was a slightest hint of pity, he wouldn’t consent to the movie. Later, even people who came to the screenings couldn’t believe how it was possible for him to capture pictures like that.

I know that I don’t have any kind of physical addictions, like, nicotine addiction, for example. It’s crucial for me to not have any addictions. Addiction is what limits your freedom. This means the destruction of creative zest, personality… You have to know when to stop. There’s even such thing as love addiction which is often mistaken for love itself… Now, what does that normally end in?

Politics is a game. One shouldn’t take it seriously. You should just watch everything that happens like you watch cinematographic works. There are directors, scriptwriters, actors, extras… And as for the award for “the best male (female) actor”, producers know the names of the winners in advance.

I’m a very lucky person that I can make money on doing something that makes me happy. In this sense, you could say that I haven’t worked for one single day. Meaning working as “working one’s back off, watching the clock”. Hands down, the documentary films aimed at screenings at the festivals that I make don’t guarantee a stable income. But even when I take up a commercial shoot out of purely mercantile considerations, I still try to enjoy the process as I find ways to explicate the plot, to unfold the underlying drama. It sometimes happens that the client considers it to be “too sophisticated”… However, I always get to keep the director’s cut in my archive.