Russia's short film Violin, part of a full-length project in memory of Holocaust victims, seeks to contend for an Oscar award, film producer Yegor Odintsov said.
"Representatives of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have confirmed that the film has qualified and will contend for the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film," TASS cited him as saying.
The short film, directed by Konstantin Fam is the last, third part of a full-length project of three novels in memory of Holocaust victims.
Violin is built around an amazing fate of a unique musical instrument that lives through all horrors of the war. The story begins at a violin manufacturing facility, where a violin, created at the start of the 20th century, is meant as a gift to a Jewish boy, and ends years later with a concert at Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall.
The film is based on the story of musicians from the Janowska concentration camp, where an orchestra of outstanding Jewish musicians was executed in 1944. This tragic episode was part of the Nuremberg Trials. The filming took a year with locations in Russia, the US, the Czech Republic, Belarus and Israel.
The lead roles were played by Vladimir Koshevoy, Lenn Kudrjawizki, Masha King, Mikhail Gorevoy, Vyacheslav Chepurenko, Aleem Kandour and Maria Zykova.
The first series of the package film, Shoes, was released in 2012, becoming the winner of many Russian and international film festivals. The next series, Brutus, filmed along the same lines, showed the tragedy through the eyes of a German shepherd dog called Brutus.
The film premiered at the competitive program of the 39th Moscow International Film Festival in 2017 and will be released in 2018.
