Blue Canary Films Presents "SECRETS OF SNOW - SLAVA'S JOURNEY"

Our project began when a friend invited us to film him backstage in "Slava's Snowshow". This was a stage spectacular that had completely sold out the long Christmas season at the Royal Festival Hall.

It featured clowns, but it was immediately clear that this was no conventional clown show, nor was it just for children. The show opened with Slava, in a beat-up yellow costume, trying to hang himself with a noose. This moved into a fluid sequence of sketches and tableaux culminating in an enormous artificial blizzard that totally engulfed the audience. The clowns themselves were utterly unlike any circus performers we had ever seen before, a cross between medieval plague physicians and Meer cats. No story and no obvious structure; no singing or speaking; hypnotically slow and strange, the show was far more Samuel Beckett than Coco the Clown. Yet the entire audience, children and adults, loved it and left with big grins on their faces.

Backstage, Slava was beaming with delight but rather aloof from the antics of his clowns. He was the Master Clown, a serious artist pulling a medieval tradition into a digital world. What was particularly fascinating for us was the way he had managed to straddle both this serious art world and popular entertainment, with an act that genuinely appealed to both very young children and very sophisticated adults without compromise or condescension. In addition, we were fascinated by an art that had its origins in Soviet Russia and had somehow become truly international, or perhaps 'supranational'.

He saw our footage, and liked it so much he invited us down to his extraordinary home outside Paris.
After several more visits, Slava asked us to film a festival he staged in his wild woodland grounds. He felt the resulting film matched his own aesthetics in the way it blurred the border between the real world and dreams.

Slava then mentioned a project that was very dear to his heart. He wanted to take Snowshow into the far north of Russia, his mother country, in the middle of winter.

It had to be the 'real Russian Winter', in January when the world was at its most cold and dark.

And it had to be by train.

Slava is an enormous global star. He has been a clown and visual artist for over forty-five years. For nearly twenty of those 'Snowshow' has sold out the most prestigious venues all over the world.
He could go to any glamorous, comfortable location -- Mexico, Brazil, Hawaii, India, Italy -- or even Russia in the Spring or Summer.

Instead, he chose to go to Arkhangelsk, an unlovely city close to the Arctic Circle. Not only would it be brutally cold (minus thirty) there would also be exhausting logistical problems with travel and labyrinthine bureaucracy.
But for reasons of his own, Slava had to have 'the Real Russian Winter'.

"Perhaps we would like to come, with our cameras?"

We realised immediately that this was a fantastic opportunity to film a unique and fascinating artist. The long train journey would be a great vehicle for him to reflect upon his life, his art and Russia.

The sheer strangeness of the project -- joining a bunch of anarchic clowns and their charismatic leader on an epic train journey through Russia, to take Snowshow into the real snow and onto the frozen White Sea -- was something that leant itself naturally to a film that merged documentary, performance and fantasy.

Slava smiled and nodded.

He had been approached many times to make a film of his life and art, but had never agreed until now.


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