When you have a distributor who brings to market a select few documentary items, then one would have to think that their might be something special about Vadim Jendreyko’s The Woman with the Five Elephants. That something “special”, might have to do with Svetlana Geier, a Dostoevsky-translating expert who has a rich backstory of her own. The Cinema Guild have picked up the well travelled doc which was featured in the Hot Docs, Viennale, Locarno, Rotterdam and at the AFI/Discovery Channel Silverdocs Film Festival where it picked up the Sterling Award for a World Feature. Expect an early 2011 release.
Svetlana Geier is considered one of the world’s greatest translators of Russian literature. Her new German translations of Dostoevsky’s five great novels, known as the five elephants, are literary milestones and the culmination of a life’s work. But her success has come with its share of loss. As a child in the Ukraine, Svetlana witnessed first-hand the impact of Stalin’s purges. As a young girl, she watched Nazi forces occupy her country. Her love of the written word and gift for languages ensured her survival. But it forced her to make a choice that altered the course of her life. “The Woman with the Five Elephants” pieces together the mystery of her life and work—not by reading it from left to right, as Geier says of her craft, but by understanding it as a whole.
