‘L'Amiral Tchoumakov - Laurier Fourniau & Arnaud Alberola’

Issyk-Kul, perched in the high mountains of north-east Kyrgyzstan, is one of the five deepest lakes in the world. On its banks, dark cement and steel buildings rise up towards the sky. This is the abandoned port of Balykchy. A new director has come to disturb the peace of the port, which he intends to convert into a seaside resort. This is the pride of an Admiral of the Soviet Navy, Boris Vasilyevich Tchumakov. He embodies a joyful, combative yet at the same time terribly melancholic allegorical figure of what remains of the Soviet man, 30 years after the fall of the USSR.

Laurier Fourniau is a fiction and documentary film-maker based between Brussels and Paris. In the United States, he directed Low Notes, his first self-produced feature film. He moved to Brussels to continue his studies at the film and drama school INSAS. The Admiral Tchumakov, shot in Kyrgyzstan, is his first feature-length documentary. Laurier is also cameraman, editor and composer for most of his films. 

Arnaud Alberola is a cinematographer based in Paris and Brussels who works on narration, documentary and installations. His work has premiered at the Berlinale, the Rotterdam Film Festival, the IDFA, and MoMa New Directors/New Films, and has been selected for the Césars and the European Film Awards. He was awarded the Best Young Talent Cinematographer prize in 2019 by the SBC (Belgian Society of Cinematographers).

The screening will be followed by a conversation in French with the directors, moderated by Anton Kouzemin (actor and author).