Word: vania
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Filmed in the small country of Dagastan, Bodrov and his crew transformed a town that spoke 36 dialects and languages into a working set, using townspeople as extras in many of the scenes. Bodrov found a star in one of them, the twelve-year old Valentine Fedotova, who plays Vania's protector, the daughter of his captor. Silent at first, her incredible eyes convey innocence while her daily life conveys drudgery. With her mother dead, she is the woman of the house, the cook, the cleaner, the farmer and the care-taker. She cannot help but care...
...pervades the captives' existence. Sasha, who joined the army because he "was stupid, liked guns, and needed money," is an experienced and somewhat psychotic soldier who shoots rounds in open fields and yells a lot. He is a story-teller, a liar and a lush, and his influence on Vania leads to drunken dances, exercise routines to "Let My People Go" and a rather vocal victory for Vania in the town's fixed wrestling match...
...laughter slowly dies when Vania's mother comes to rescue her only son and the full reality of life and death are slowly realized. As a school teacher in Russia, she reads Vania's letters to her students, letters that are never long enough to satisfy her. When she receives a letter from the captive Vania asking for help, she leaves her life behind and enters the danger of Chechnya to save...
...journey marks the second time she has come to save Vania. As a child, he fell down an abandoned well and she searched for him all day. After he was found, she spent the next day filling the well so no other child would ever be hurt in the same way again. Years before, in a Russia she could understand, she could save her son, yet in war, she finds the challenge of saving him impossible...
While sitting across a cafe table with her son's captor, desperate father and desperate mother, Chechen and Russian, she appeals to Vania's captor, a man who, like her, knows the pain of losing a child to war. Yet even he is not moved. "We are enemies," he says. Negotiation and compromise are out of the question...