Onboard Diary

Onboard Diary. Moscow day 3

It took me three days to begin writing this short road diary. Till today I was just strolling out of time around the cold and blue streets. Till today time looked stopped to me.

Two contradictory feelings face each other in Moscow. One of them is antiquity. Everything is huge, majestic. Every building brings us back to a great period.

Another one is rising modernity. Anyone can see hundreds of McDonald´s everywhere, or buy Nivea cream at the supermarket, smocking a Marlboro cigarette while watching shoes at Zara.

However, anyone can get any of the million typical products fully crowding all shelves.

Until today I hadn´t realized that Moscow is a terribly distant city. Its inhabitants are some cold and you better don´t expect warm kindness from them at all. At the same time is a warm city in deed where feeling at home takes you just a couple of days.

And that´s the reason why this diary begins today, because so many things happened to make me feel among the stars. At home.

We got up early this morning. I´ve been working on the lecture I will give at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (University) of the MFA (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) of Russia (MGIMO), where I´ve been invited to talk about "cultural identity on Spanish cinema".

I will show some fragments from Val del Omar´s work, who will concentrate most of my talk. I will talk about Buñuel, Zulueta and Víctor Erice as well.

I hope the information in my head about Spanish cinema will be enough for their interest.

Later we´ve gone to the Russian State Institute of Cinematography. The mythical VGIK. Almost a sacred place which saw passing by important figures like Sokurov, Konchalovsky, Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, Pudovkin, Mikhail Romm, Vadim Tusov or my beloved Andrei Tarkovski.

We visited the facilities. Some students where experimenting on 35mm with light on a character. I gave them a Polaroid. I´ve been chatting about digital edition with an analog editor. She is cutting celluloid since 42 years. She thanked me for truly respecting her work. We´ve seen art students painting, actors dancing, directors planning future practices.

And finally we´ve been received by Tatiana Storchak Nikolaevna, school´s Vice-Chancellor.

She did encourage us with our project, specially praising the artistic and practical part of our financial and distribution model.

We are in contact with her to organize a talk with students to explain them the model and discuss it, may be during production lessons. I wish it will happen.

Finally we offered her spanish typical marzipan as a gift and she gave us back a camera-shaped clock, from the 90th anniversary. My hands were trembling when touched it.

We had just left, the sun was shining on the snow fully covering the street when Julia´s cell started ringing. After the conversation she could hardly control herself. We began dancing and jumping in the street until she calmed down and explained everything to me.

We have a support letter from ROSCOSMOS (Russian Federal Space Agency), the most important space organism together with NASA in the history of aeronautic aviation.

They support the project. But not just that, they have sent a fax-communiqué to all Space Agencies in Russian territory to help us anyway we may need. On Friday we´ll go and visit the City of Stars: the mythical Gagarin Space Center where cosmonauts of many countries in the world have been training for 50 years. I can hardly believe it.

We also got a meeting with three cosmonauts.

One of them, Boris Volynov, flew on missions Soyuz 5 and 21. The other two are current cosmonauts.

They came back from out space little time ago: Sergei Volkov and Oleg Kononenko. We´ll have lunch together and talk about their life and script details. It will be a historic moment.

At the end of the day the cosmonaut costumes have arrived to our place here. Old, worn, impressive...I couldn´t hold myself back.

May be, if we are lucky enough, the costumes will be sent on diplomatic mail by the spanish embassy in Moscow so we get rid of costume matters. I hope it so. It´s one o´clock in the morning and I still have some work to do. Another million of marvelous circumstances will happen tomorrow and I will enjoy every second on this profession of mine.

See you tomorrow, wish you dreams about long distance flights.

Nicolás Alcalá.