Summary

Russia, its culture and conflicts, the 1920s and 1930s, the avant-garde movements persecuted by the authorities. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi open the precious workshop of their creation to us: old films, photographs from the Tsarist era, the Russian Revolution, and the years that followed, Angela Ricci Lucchi's watercolors, comments, texts (Chekhov, Anna Akhmatova, Nina Berberova, Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Pushkin, Mandelstam), fairy tales for children. And then the figures encountered during their travels in Russia, “living archives” to whom the two filmmakers want to restore presence and voice. In this way, we discover the materials that feed their new film, in preparation, "Journey in Russia" (2017), making this, as the suffix of the title indicates, "A propos de," "About," a sort of catalog. Gradually, however, these notes acquire an autonomous dimension that encompasses a poetic universe: the intimate sphere of the artists.