Oksana Mysina
Director
Oksana Mysina is one of Russia's most accomplished actors. Splitting her time between work on stage and on screen, she has performed on Off-Broadway, Avignon, Brazil and 20 other countries, and has appeared in over 40 films with many of Russia's top directors. She is the leader of her own rock band, Oxy Rocks, whose music and/or musicians usually find their way into her films. She has won numerous cinema awards, including the Golden Ram Debut Award for her performance in Vadim Abdrashitov's Play for a Passenger. Her performance of Empress Maria in Vitaly Melnikov's Poor, Poor Pavel was nominated for a Nika, the so-called Russian Oscar. Mysina debuted as a film director in 2020 with Insulted. Belarus(sia), a full-length political film based on the play by Andrei Kureichik. It premiered in Russia on TV Rain on November 15, 2020. Red, Blue and Asya was actually the first film Oksana shot, although it was released as if it were her third film, following her second released film, the short Ivan Petrovich. Strictly speaking, On the Road to Antigone was the second film Oksana made with her husband John Freedman on camera, although it is the fourth to be released. It employs the devices of documentary film but seeks to tell a creative and ambiguous tale. The film features an all-Greek cast of women from the Girls of Old Town theater troupe with which Oksana has performed in her new hometown of Chania, Crete. Oksana is in the post-production stage with a feature film, Woman and Angel, shot with a cast of Greek, Italian and Polish actors. She is in the early stages of filming another feature based on a script by famed Russian political comic Viktor Shenderovich with Russian actors. Mysina edits her own films, and is her own post-production team.
Inside the Film
From the Director
The Road to Antigone is a semi-documentary film in Greek that explores the theme of making hard choices.
The young Antigone, the legendary mythological figure, the tragic heroine – she who did not hesitate to tell the whole world “no” – is the catalyst for thoughts uttered by all the women of the film. What do you do when faced with acute danger? How do you overcome fear? Who is to blame for the world being so unjust?
Our film is a documentary because the women and boys in it were never anything but themselves, although every one of them existed fully in the conditions set before them by the director. Everything here – whether directly or indirectly – flowed from one of the most paradoxical and mysterious heroines of ancient Greek mythology – Antigone, daughter of Oedipus.
For many centuries in many cultures Antigone has been the object of research and study done by philosophers, scholars, and theater artists. As a Russian actress, I found it fascinating to hear and feel what the attitude was to Antigone in the land of ancient Greek mythology, to discover how those who literally ingested the myth with their mother's milk would react to it. What would they think, those who absorbed by osmosis the tragic tale of the young women who placed herself in direct opposition to a complacent, smug and utterly self-satisfied world?
The form of this film is a series of monologues. Its content, however, is naked emotion.
It is a film about the existential loneliness of the human being, at least among the more introspective of them.
This film was intended to be an element in an outdoor theater performance based on Jean Anouilh's play Antigone. But it quickly took on a life of its own and now stands alone as an independent experiment in mixing the devices of documentary and narrative film.