Sombryuk

Biryuk, a debutante from Yekaterinburg, Polina Fedorova, is the only Russian film selected for the most prestigious short program at the Annecy Festival, after which, as is already known, the film will go to the famous Japanese festival in Hiroshima. In fact, a few more domestic films will go to Annecy, but most of them fell into the recently created program “for the young audience”, which is still not so honorable. It’s a paradox: those Russian films that are now in the “children’s and teenage program” of the French festival (like Roman Sokolov’s “Theory of Sunset”) at Russian festivals are more likely to fall into adult programs.
And “Biruk”, on the contrary, at our Suzdal festival received a diploma in the category “for the best film for children” with the ironic wording “for the artistic introduction of folk pedagogy.”

The plot of Polina’s film is quite simple: a lively village girl is naughty before going to bed, her grandmother cannot cope with her and promises that a certain Biryuk will come for such behavior, take her away and eat her, and, for greater persuasiveness, stomps outside the door, like an unknown monster, frightening child. And in the morning the girl gets up like a silken one, and promises that she will no longer indulge, if only Biryuk does not come.
The pedagogy, of course, is so-so, but quite traditional, just as the initial and final scenes look quite traditional with cute and colorful hand-drawn animation on a rural theme: a cat, a grandmother, pies, the sun through the window. And the most interesting thing in this film and its own, moreover, lying in line with the author’s Ural animation, is an almost monochrome nightmare scene of a girl who for some reason found herself in the forest at night and was running away from something similar to a monstrous tree that came to life, as she apparently imagined Biryuk himself. And the fact that it was not at all clear what kind of terrible creature it was was especially frightening, and even terrible wolves and owls were rushing around, from which it was impossible to hide.