Life with Bacteria / Жизнь с бактериями

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2017 | Documentary | 52 min. | Russia

This film is about the difficulties of acquiring new knowledge. Andrey Shestakov is the head of the microbial biotechnology laboratory at Moscow State University. In the summer, he and his science team travel all over the country, from the Caucasus to the White Sea. Their main goal is to find and test microbes useful to humans. But, the main detective story awaits him in Moscow, in the laboratory of MSU.

Directors Statement

We shot a film-portrait of young scientists-microbiologists. People who are not less dependent on adrenaline than fighter pilots, paratroopers, hunters or sportsmen. In the case of our heroes, this is the adrenaline of scientific knowledge. Each of them has its own. And the main director's attitude, which we gave ourselves, was to show not only the many moments of its strongest splash but also the chain of events that led to these moments. The vital atmosphere in which today's young scientist is immersed. To show how the solution of a problem of a planetary scale is gradually narrowing down to the simplest act of scientific knowledge, at first glance, nothing related to this problem. The most difficult was to take the plot from within science itself and try to make it understandable to the viewer. We did not work with something past but with what is happening in the laboratory here and now. And this is the "porridge" of people and experiments. It is impossible to predict in advance which task will make the hero truly "warm his head". Therefore, it was necessary to understand the microbiology quite seriously, after which to shoot a huge number of set-ups, slightly fewer conflicts, and almost one single ending. In fact, the process of scientific knowledge has outweighed everything and proved to be much more interesting than the amazing discoveries that have occurred in microbiology in recent years. At least for us.

Directors: Andrey Timoshchenko and Stanislav Stavinov

Producer: Valery Timoshchenko

Studios: Krasnodar Film Studio and JSC "Nauka"