Aquarium / Akvarium

Credits

cast

Ilya Shagalov

Director
12/14/1986

Biography

Born in 1986 in the city of Krasnodar, Russia. In 2008 he graduated from the acting school of Krasnodar State University of Culture and the Arts. In 2012 he graduated from the theatre directing program which was led by the famous theatre and film director Kirill Serebrennikov at The Moscow Art Theatre School. Since 2013 he has been a member of the Gogol Centre (Moscow, Russia) where he worked as a video installation artist on many stage productions including The Midsummer Night's Dream, The Hunting of the Snark, the Machine Müller etc. He also worked for Kirill Serebrennikov as his assistant director on the stage productions of Woyzeck (at the Latvian National Theater) and the opera Salome (at the Staatsoper Stuttgart, Germany). He did collaborative projects with the Meyerhold Theater and Cultural Center, the Theatre of Nations and the Shchusev Museum of Architecture in Moscow, and also with the Vene Teater (Tallinn), Die Schaubühne (Berlin), and the Théâtre des Deux Rives (Rouen). Ilya Shagalov is the co-author and stage director of the documental opera Die Einfachen written by the composer Sergey Nevsky and first performed at the ECLAT Festival Neue Musik Stuttgart in 2021. He also directed the Internet version of the theatrical production Fairies originally directed by David Bobée. Aquarium is the first full-length feature film made by Ilya Shagalov.

Directors Statement

This movie emerged by itself; it was a truly happy coincidence when everything came together at the right time and in the right place. The movie, acting by itself, found and selected me and the whole cast and crew. One might say that we weren't making the movie - instead, the movie itself was dictating the terms of our work to us and manifesting itself through us. The central idea of Aquarium matched my own emotions at the time: I was 35 and haunted by typical thoughts that occur during a midlife crisis: “Am I really who I should be? Am I living the life that I should live?” All our life is a series of choices which, in turn, build our life and shape the trajectory of our future path. Maybe these main questions of my movie are: «What does “the right choice» actually mean? Does my choice depend on me personally or on the circumstances? To what extent can my social environment oppress me?” The genre of my movie, as I define it, is utopia. The main difference between utopia and dystopia is that utopia depicts an ideal world – a world devoid of aggression, devoid of pressure, devoid of conflict. In such a world people are happy, they are finally living the life we all dream of. The world is perfect, the people are perfect, the protagonist is a perfect person who accidentally makes a blunder, upsetting the balance of the world order. In an instant, his whole life starts to change: friends turn their backs on him, at work he is treated with growing suspicion, his relationship with his family becomes tense... My protagonist's misdeed seems to make him more sober-headed, shatters his rose-tinted glasses, forcing him to see life from a new perspective. I was interested in finding the way to show the detached attitude of my main character, to make him an onlooker. Telling the story of a person who is facing a choice is difficult. It happens at a point frozen in time, when the past is still going on and the future depends on one's choice. We tried all means to depict odd and scary things that the protagonist starts to notice, to break off any predictable plot lines. It was important for us to avoid any commonplace tropes, so to speak, to make a movie that would be different, not the kind we are used to, but at the same time we strived to keep the movie visually attractive and light-hearted. It was important for me to make the viewer my accomplice, to entice them to guess what would happen next. As for the questions raised by the movie, the answers are also left to the viewer. “Aquarium” is my first movie, so when I was working on it I kept learning the lessons it gave me while I was creating it. The filmmaking process is an endless search for compromises and a struggle to reject them. The script called for “bright sunshine, a perfect day, a neat and smooth lawn” - but, of course, while we were shooting on location, every single day was rainy, the sky was gray and the lawn looked wilted. This inspired my director of photography Andrei Mayka and me to invent ways and means that would work on behalf of our movie instead of ruining it. The result was that my favorite scenes were determined by unpredictable weather rather than by our expectations. We invested much time and effort in choosing a location that would fit the image of our “ideal world”, and finally the Krasnodar Park became this world! This place has special importance for me because I come from this city, I grew up in Krasnodar. This park is an excellent example of a non-governmental initiative showing how an entrepreneur's private project can transform the people and the history of a city. By choosing the Krasnodar Park I'm paying homage to the life of the whole city.