Seventeen years ago, Sergey Debizhev shot his firstmovie Two Captains 2,
which made him a cult figure in the eyes of Russian intellectual bohemians.
Since then, he has mainly released documentaries and shorts but he
has now made as a secondmovie. Although The Golden Mean has been termedan
“adventure drama”, the director has added elements of fantasy, mysticism
and a historical movie to his work. The action takes place in three
countries, Russia, France and Cambodia, and in three different periods,
the start of the twentieth century, the SecondWorldWar period and its immediate
aftermath and the present day. The principal character, amovie director,
discovers a very old photograph of his grandfather, whowas once an
officer and served in the Normandie-Niemen squadron on the Eastern
Front. It suddenly transpires that his grandfather did not perish in the war
but made his way to colonial Indochina. As our hero waits for his inheritance
in Paris, he finds himself having to mount his own investigation.“The
movie is unusual in both its form and content,” says Debizhev. “We used
a very large number of different techniques associated with the formal side
of moviemaking, and the movie may seem extremely unusual and even
shocking.”