Salvatores to start Siberian Education in Lithuania

by Vittoria Scarpa

14/03/2011 - Based on the eponymous best-selling autobiography by Russian writer Nicolai Lilin Gabriele Salvatores’s new film Educazione Siberiana (Siberian Education) will be shot in part in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius. Filming will begin at the end of August and run three weeks.

''I’m heading back to Lithuania soon, where we’re in the middle of casting", said the director of the 1992 Oscar-winning film Mediterraneo, following the Rome screening of his documentary 1960 (shown out of competition at Venice 2010). "The main characters are young Russians, they’ll act in English and we follow them the ages of 10 to 20. There will also be a 60-something male and a young female, who will be English or American, who will be played by name actors.''

Translated into 14 languages, Siberian Education looks at the adolescence and coming-of-age of the writer (born in 1980 and living in Italy since 2003) within a community of ‘honest’ criminals (Siberian Urkas) in the last years of the Soviet Union, in Transnistria, where they were deported by Stalin in the 1930s.

“We were supposed to shoot there,” explains Salvatores, "but seeing as how numerous criminal communities were deported there in the past, it is still today a very dangerous place, where you see armed Al Qaeda gangs all around. It was impossible to work there so we opted for Lithuania, which is similar, between Moldavia and the Black Sea.”

Written by the Stefano Rulli and Sandro Petraglia, Educazione Siberiana will not be produced by the director’s company, Colorado, but Cattleya (which had bought the book rights) and Universal.

(Translated from Italian)