“Boogie Bones” is touted as one of Russia’s first musicals, a fun movie with an energetic score and colorful design to match. The film is now being shown to buyers at the AFM in Los Angeles.
The Moscow indie production company Krasnaya Strela, Red Arrow, is hoping to attract audiences domestically and internationally with a feel-good 1950s sing-along.
Director Valery Todorovsky, who set up Krasnaya Strela with producer Vadim Goryainov and fellow director Dmitry Meskhiyev three years ago, handles a genre long forgotten in modern Russian cinema.
The film brings to the screen the historically inspired story of 1950s Russian rock ‘n’ roll in a way producers hope teen audiences will respond to.
Goryainov, who screened a 20-minute clip for Eastern European buyers in October at Warsaw’s CentEast market, says the songs are versions of Russian hits from the 1980s rescored with a 1950s mood.
“Boogie Bones,” made on a $15 million budget, is full of humor and joy, qualities that are often absent in Russian film. Combining musical scenes with a classic boy-meets-girl yarn, “Boogie Bones” will premiere in Moscow December 24, bearing its Russian title “Stilyagi.”
In the film, uniform-clad young Communists break up illicit rock ‘n’ roll parties until one of them, Mels, (Anton Shagin) falls in love with a beautiful girl named Polza (Oksana Akinshina, who played Irena Neski in “Bourne Supremacy”).
