| 2004: Prophets and Gains | Debut Films at Pittsburgh Filmmakers | STW [СТВ] Film Company | Pygmalion Productions | NTV-Profit Film Company |
| Mon May 3 | Tue May 4 |
| 10am Sergei Bodrov, Sr.: The Bear's Kiss, 2002. Intro by Daniel Wild. | 10am Aleksei Balabanov: War, 2002. Intro by Dawn Seckler. |
2pm Aleksei Balabanov: The River, 2002. Intro by Neia Zorkaia. Sergei Sel'ianov: The Russian Idea, 1995. Intro by Gerald McCausland. |
2pm Sergei Sel'ianov: Not Yet a Time for Sorrow, 1995. Intro by Elena Stishova. |
Screenings take place at 106 David Lawrence Hall
STW Film Company was founded in 1992 by directors Sergei Sel'ianov and Aleksei Balabanov, and producer Vasilii Grigor'ev, though the company's reputation has been dominated from the start by the two directors, Sel'ianov and Balabanov.
In the fourteen years of its existence, STW has released more than thirty feature films and documentaries, as well as a number of shorts and animation films, which have won more than seventy prizes at domestic and international film festivals. The company has produced art house and experimental films, genre films, and films for the general viewing audience. In addition, STW has worked successfully on a number of international co-productions, including Gul'shad Omarova's The Schiz: Fifty-Fifty (2004, with Kazakhstan), Stefan Vouiet's Winter Heat (2004, with Belgium), Pavel Loungine's Tycoon (2002, with France), and Sergei Bodrov Sr.'s The Bear's Kiss (2002, with Germany).
Sergei Sel'ianov, who has been the Director of STW since it was founded, had already established a solid reputation as an auteur filmmaker during the final years of the Soviet Union. His debut film, A Saint's Day (co-directed with Nikolai Makarov) was shot in 1980, the same year that Sel'ianov graduated from the Scriptwriting Department of the State Institute for Filmmaking (VGIK). Virtually the first underground film made in the Soviet Union, with every stage of production occurring independently of the state-financed film industry, A Saint's Day was not released until 1988. It was highly praised by leading Soviet film critics, as was his first solo film, Day of the Spirit (1990). Since founding STW, Sel'ianov has directed only two other films: the melodrama Not Yet a Time for Sorrow (1995) and the video documentary The Russian Idea (1995), which was part of a series on national cinemas commissioned by the British Film Institute and produced by Colin MacCabe, who also serves as Distinguished Professor of English on the faculty here at the University of Pittsburgh.
Aleksei Balabanov completed the Higher Courses for Film Directors in 1990. He began his career as the director of what Russians refer to as "elite films," that is, films aimed at cinéastes rather than the general viewing public. His first two films were literary adaptations of Samuel Beckett's Happy Days (1990) and Franz Kafka's The Castle (1994). His career took a sharp turn with his short film Trofim (1995, co-scripted with Sel'ianov), which was part of a "film almanac," The Arrival of the Train, to commemorate the centenary of cinema. Trofim was Balabanov's first film that was addressed both to professional film critics and the general viewing public. His subsequent films have engendered intense interest and polemics within and between both of these constituencies: Brother (1997), Of Freaks and Men (1998), Brother-2 (2000), and War (2002). Balabanov has emerged as a major filmmaker in the past decade.
STW and its staff have been involved in producing the following films:
| 2004: Prophets and Gains | Debut Films at Pittsburgh Filmmakers | STW [СТВ] Film Company | Pygmalion Productions | NTV-Profit Film Company |