Press releases

MINSK, 29 May (BelTA) - The debut feature film by Belarusian director Darya Zhuk Crystal Swan will be premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), the Czech Republic, BelTA learned from the ART Corporation center of visual and performing arts.

It is the largest Class A film festival in Central and Eastern Europe. Crystal Swan will be featured in the East of the West program and will open the competition program, the center informed.

Crystal Swan is a coming-of-age story about a young woman in post-soviet Belarus in the mid 1990’s. She loves house music and dreams of going to Chicago where this music style emerged a decade earlier. To get a visa to America, she fakes her visa application by buying a letter of employment on the black market and instead of America the heroine ends up by the phone in a small town waiting for the US embassy to call.

The film stars Alina Nasibullina (How Victor The Garlic Took Alexey The Stub to the Nursing Home), Ivan Mulin (The Junior Team), actress of the Yanka Kupala National Academic Theater Svetlana Anikei and others.

Crystal Swan was screened at the international festivals in New York (the United States), Cottbus (Germany), and Tallinn (Estonia) where Darya Zhuk’s film was named the best film project.

Darya Zhuk was born in Minsk. She graduated from Harvard University and Columbia University in the United States. She worked at HBO and shot a number of short-length films that won prizes at international film festivals. One of them, The Real American, received a diploma of the Minsk International Film festival Listapad in 2015.

The 53rd edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival will be held from 29 June to 7 July. Among the films that were previously featured in the KVIFF were Brother by Aleksey Balabanov, Amelie by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Arrhythmia by Boris Khlebnikov and many other movies that have become iconic. The last time Belarus was represented in the KVIFF competition program was in 2004 with Occupation. Mysteries by Andrey Kudinenko.

Crystal Swan will hit cinema screens in Belarus in September.