IVAN PETROVICH

Ivan Petrovich is a collaborative effort if ever there was one. It began with a monologue from a play called The Suicide by Russian-Soviet playwright Nikolai Erdman. Alexander Kochubei brought it to his friend Oksana Mysina and suggested they make a film of it. One fine afternoon shortly after that Alexander and Oksana, joined by Alexander's wife Svetlana Kochubei with the family camera in hand, headed out into the wilds of Moscow to shoot material for the future film. But Oksana is voracious. And when she heard that Alexander possessed footage of hundreds of fishing trips around the world, she wanted to see all of it. That still wasn't enough, however, and she put her own family's camera in the hands of her husband John Freedman and took him out into the wilds of Crete to add still more images. At some point Oksana dipped into the work of her own rock band Oxy Rocks, specifically the song "Ivan Petrovich." Now, properly inspired, Oksana sat down at the editing station in her home studio and put together the 19 minutes, 46 seconds that now make up the film, Ivan Petrovich.