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"At the shooting, we called our film 'Russian people's sci-fi', the director Ivan Sosnin about the film Alien

The director Ivan Sosnin, the producers Yana Shmailova, Filipp Bobrov, the actors Maxim Stoyanov and Alena Miroshnikova presented the film Alien participating in the Main Competition of 46th Moscow International Film Festival.

Only just ordinary people live in a small Ural village. Except for the local hearing-impaired "fool" Lyosha. He lives in a makeshift house made of garbage, draws strange circles in the fields every week and spends days trying to catch radio waves hoping to contact extraterrestrial civilizations. The villagers laugh at Lyosha and his strange hobbies, but everything changes when the one he has been calling for so long finally comes to visit him.

Ivan Sosnin: "I like films about space and made two clips on the space topic, but it always seemed to me it was not possible to shoot a sci-fi without a huge budget. But two years ago, we ventured to do it. I have been thinking this over in my head to shoot something where reality touches fantastic, and all the puzzle pieces fit in. I wrote a script for two weeks and then we went to the village and spent a week there. The house we filmed is real and located in Murzinka settlement in Sverdlovsk region. I wanted to make a doc there but finally we added to it the idea of this feature film, which we call the Russian people's sci-fi, just for fun".

Yana Shmailova: "This is our first studio-shot film, a great challenge and an experiment. We split the shooting in three blocks. The first block was very short, to make it, we used all studio's money and the money Vanya and I had in our accounts and credit cards. We like the genre, but we feared to take the risk, and in this case we just decided to do it right now or never. And then after the first block we found the funding followed by other productions' support and then we could finish the film production".

Alyona Miroshnikova: "I imagined aliens were not like people, thought they would make me a strange green creature with horns, so I was really surprised to see they would not change my look and that I needed just to be myself in the film".

Maxim Stoyanov: "I do not treat Lyosha as queer or "a fool" like it is written in the synopsis. He might seem "a God's fool" on one hand, but he also is the most whole, intelligent, and down-to-earth person among all others around him. Moreover, he is a person of ultimate kindness".