New interpretation of Grin

A four-episode film, tentatively titled Scarlet Sails, is being made in Kyiv.

It is a co-production of the Inter TV channel, Inter Media Productions studios, and the companies Ukrfilmtrust and Pronto Films. The movie authors claim it is going to be a new interpretation of Alexander Grin’s novel with the same title. The film is being directed by Oleksandr Stekolenko, with Roman Balaian exercising overall artistic supervision. The leading roles of Assole and Captain Gray were assigned to Veronika Ivashchenko (Gloss, SSD, and Ranetki) and Aleksandr Bukharov (The Monarch’s Servant, Wolf Dog, and Gentlemen Officers: Save the Emperor), respectively. Also involved in this TV project are such celebrities as Yurii Stoianov, Albert Filozov, Semen Furman, Mikhail Svetin, Evklid Kurdzidis, and others. Audiences will also see Sofia-Nicole, a five-year-old daughter of MP Mykola Katerynchuk, as the little Assole.

The shooting began in Yalta last September. A 1,000-square-meter township was built for this purpose in the Crimea. Eleven people, who worked 20 hours a day for 36 days, were busy making scenery for the imaginary city of Liss described by Grin. The film’s production designers say the scenery is based on Mediterranean seascapes and the colorful Cuban architecture. The film crew took the rest of the props – furniture and other interior objects – from the Grin Museum, the Yalta film studios, and even bought some on a flea-market. Crowd scenes were played by Nigerian students who study at Simferopol’s colleges. They wore flamboyant costumes, as if they lived on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.

The movie will show a real sailing ship — the Caliacra (named Secret in the film) leased in Bulgaria. It would have taken Balaian’s team several days and hundreds of meters of cloth, as it did Captain Gray in Grin’s novel, to make sails but, thanks to the mastery of Ukrainian computer engineers, the sails become scarlet without the film-makers having to involve an army of seamstresses.