Commissioner's
Comment Nick Fraser
Storyville Series Editor
This has to rank with the most bizarre and remarkable experiences I've had in commissioning documentaries.
Viktor Kossakovsky wanted to make a film that showed how Russia had changed from being the heart of world communism to the frontier of tooth and claw capitalism. But Viktor had a very original way of showing the change - by investigating it within his lifetime.
He found a hundred people had been born on on 19 July 1961, the same day as him, in St Petersburg, then called Leningrad. He managed to film 48 of them, and then set out to string together scenes in which they were filmed living their daily lives in to some sort of narrative.
The experience nearly killed him - because the mafia in St Petersburg didn't believe that his story was more than a cover story. I think it is quite wonderful - you think the film is going to be very depressing and it turns out to be like one of the great Russian novels.
