Issue 88 (2025) |
Anna Chernakova: Katya-Katya (2023) reviewed by Katya Lopatko © 2025 |
Katya-Katya, the latest feature from Anna Chernakova, co-written with the veteran Soviet-Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Adabashyan, stitches together the stories of two teens with the same name living in Moscow eight decades apart. The historic Katya’s story, which takes up the first 44 minutes of the 99-minute film, opens in the middle of the Great Patriotic War (1941-45). Katya (Ianina Zagorskaia), a strong-willed Soviet schoolgirl, refuses to evacuate the city with her family as the Germans draw near, and instead secures a job in the metro, eager to join the war effort.
From the opening scene, friends and family agree that personality, not looks, is Katya’s strongest feature, though the slim, blonde-haired girl doesn’t deviate from conventional beauty standards in any obvious way. However, appearance quickly becomes a point of anxiety when Katya’s school gives her the chance to correspond with a young naval cadet, Konstantin (Kostya for short), whose first letter includes a dashing headshot that charms Katya’s whole class. Katya’s aunt, who embodies stern, matronly Soviet wartime womanhood, urges her to write about her studiousness and community service instead of fixating on beauty (or lack thereof), a decidedly un-Soviet—but very human, the film suggests—response to the attentions of her long-distance admirer.
Katya grows more and more engrossed in Kostya’s letters, reading them in the dark while bombs fall in the distance. Her physical insecurity reaches a crisis point when Kostya offers to meet when his unit passes through Moscow on the way to the front. Katya panics, convinced that he will be disappointed when he sees her (she has not sent a photograph). To stave off what seems like imminent disaster, Katya barters pantry staples, obtained by donating her own blood, and her only pair of shoes for a custom dress sewn based on a sketch Kostya sent of his fairy-tale image of Katya. The finished dress is indeed described as fairy tale-like, featuring long white skirts, puffy sleeves, a frilly neckline, and hand-drawn red stars.
The day of Kostya’s visit, Katya is detained at work for an official ceremony where she is chosen to receive a prize for her labor contributions. She misses her rendezvous but keeps her life: as she rushes back to her apartment, bombs start to rain down (shown with jarringly edited archival footage) on her building, flattening it and killing everyone inside. However, she never learns if Kostya had arrived before the bombing. In the final scene of her storyline, Katya boards a train for the front, her long hair shorn in an austere, boyish cut. She has decided to join Kostya symbolically in the fight, possibly replacing his life with hers. With her final words, she entrusts the stack of letters, as well as one final letter that she sent but was returned, to a school friend, imploring her with a somber expression, “don’t forget the letters… the letters, don’t forget them.”
The shot of Katya’s train rolling out is our transition to the 2020s. Modern-day Katya (Oliviia Kozlova) emerges from a station on roller-skates, wearing ripped, baggy jeans, her face framed by neon pink strands of hair, a violin case strapped to her back. She is late for a classical music competition. When an uptight older woman bars her from entering because of her inappropriate clothing, Katya skates to a nearby vintage store and dons the most ridiculous dress she can find—which happens to be the same white dress with the red stars worn by the previous Katya.
From this initial unwitting brush with the past, contemporary Katya is gradually pulled into the intrigue of Katya and Kostya’s epistolary romance through a series of unlikely encounters with letters and photographs from the first part of the film. She finds partners in her quest when a big fall lands her in a hospital room shared with three slightly older volleyball players.
The four girls pore over Kostya’s letters to Katya, determined to unravel the identity and story of the dreamy youth in the photograph. Here the question of Kostya’s identity overtly becomes the central intrigue of the film, although the audience was already primed in the first half through Katya’s enthusiasm and anxiety about the ultimately thwarted meeting. The authenticity of his identity also comes under suspicion in the first half, when Katya’s friend suggests that the handsome sixteen-year-old who can write, draw and compose music like a professional seems too good to be true. This skepticism is quickly shot down as jealousy, but the suspicion persists. When contemporary Katya and her friends show their older, worldly acquaintance the letters to help find clues about Kostya, he dismisses their fantasy of a teenage love story as lacking evidence. His theory: “Kostya” never existed, but was the product of an elaborate scheme by Stalin’s propaganda apparatus that enlisted entire teams of prisoners to pose as handsome youths and correspond with naive young people, romancing them into enlisting, as indeed Katya did. “Comrade Stalin, no matter what you think of him, was a very good psychologist,” he says. The girls are outraged that the historical Katya was tricked into giving her life for a fictional romance; the acquaintance agrees, but replies, “That’s the only way wars are won, my sunshine.”
Katya-Katya received several prizes in Russia and Belarus after its November 2023 release. These include a main prize at the Minsk International Film Festival (Listapad), the special Prize of the President of the Republic of Belarus “For Humanism and Spirituality in the Cinema,” as well as the Best Child Artist Award for Ianina Zagorskaia at the same festival. The film also won special recognition from the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation for the creation of a film “oriented toward the education of the young generation in traditional Russian moral values,” as reported on kino-teatr.ru.
Given this reception, one seeks to identify the specific qualities of “humanism,” “spirituality,” and “traditional Russian moral values” that authorities sought to recognize and recommend for Russian youth. Indeed, Chernakova already has an extensive portfolio of children’s films, including Dog’s Paradise(Sobachii rai, 2014), Once upon a Time (Zhili-byli my, 2017), and All About My Sister(Pro Lioliu i Minku, 2020), an adaptation Mikhail Zoshchenko’s celebrated children’s stories.
In Katya-Katya, the didactic quality hinges on contemporary Katya’s moral transformation through her contact with the historic Katya, a model Soviet youth. At first, contemporary Katya is portrayed as highly talented but precocious, rude and selfish—visually, through her eccentric clothing and appearance, and narratively, through her callous treatment of other characters. One suggested cause of these character defects is Katya’s family situation: early on, she shares that her mom lives in Munich, her dad in London, her grandma in Moscow, and she herself lives “in the airplane.” Audiences can reasonably conclude that the neglect of her Western European-based parents—who are absent from the film—has led Katya to adopt the worst traits of liberal Western individualism: personal eccentricity, self-centeredness, disregard for tradition and collectivity. The story of the historic Katya, who channels her youthful idealism and determination towards more positive ideals, is introduced as a corrective, helping contemporary Katya, a representative of Russia’s youth, connect with her historic and moral national heritage through wartime artifacts and the emotional weight they carry.
In December 2023, Chernakova spoke at a screening of Katya-Katya at the Russian State Children’s Library and said that the filmmakers had wanted to show that “those girls” (from the Soviet 1940s) and “today’s girls” are not so different; they are, in fact, “the same girls.” Chernakova was responding to an audience comment about the film’s emotional impact in the context of contemporary current events. The audience member, who was not filmed, delivered a long, fragmented, stuttering comment with many phrases broken off, beginning like this: “My cousin’s best friend was taken to the front, at the beginning of the year, I think [2023], or even last year. I sent him towels with horses on them because he really likes horses. I’m really scared that the same thing will happen to my cousin. I was really worried about the characters [in the film].”
They continued that they felt especially moved when Katya’s apartment building was bombed, and that she couldn’t meet Kostya after sacrificing so much for the dress. “I was really crying when I was looking at her suffering and pain,” they said. “No film has brought up such feelings for me in a long time. I don’t remember when a film brought up such feelings for me. Truly.” The atmosphere in the room, as far as can be felt from the recording, was somber. As the audience member finished speaking, there was a brief smattering of applause. Responding to the comment, Chernakova also said that the film had been made over many years, implicitly before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. “While we were working on it, life turned in such a way that it became relevant again today in a totally different way,” Chernakova said.
What does it mean to say that the girls of the Soviet 1940s and contemporary Russia are the same girls, and for this recognition to constitute an education in traditional Russian values worthy of governmental recognition? What values are these girls meant to share?
The film celebrates both Katyas—and Russian youth in general—for their innocence, naivete, persistence in the face of challenges, and most of all, their faith in that which cannot be verified through evidence, but only felt emotionally: specifically, a quasi-Christian faith in the redeeming quality of love, and a faith in the honesty and good intentions of others, including the government. The film’s final scene confirms this idealistic view against the cynical suspicions of Stalin’s meddling.
Through a series of fateful encounters, contemporary Katya finds the author of Kostya’s letters, now an old man, a friend of Kostya’s who continued to serve as a pen-pal in his name when Kostya was killed. Though deceptive, Sergei’s intentions were pure; he couldn’t bear to disappoint the girl, and meant to tell her the truth when he met her in person in Kostya’s place. However, his unit was re-routed, and he never made it to Moscow, but survived the war and looked for Katya afterwards with no success—she was declared missing in action. Crucially, however, the factual inconsistencies in the story were resolved without compromising the moral integrity of anyone involved, including political leaders.
Although the story was written earlier, it is difficult not to interpret it in the light of Russia’s invasion and war in Ukraine, as the anonymous audience member did, not just the World War II setting celebrating patriotic sacrifice, but its overall glorification of idealism and faith in the ultimate righteousness of one’s nation, even when the facts suggest otherwise. To equate the girls of the 40s and today implies a resurrection of Stalinist values, as depicted in the heyday of socialist realist cinema, which encouraged Russians to suffer the present for a promised future. In Katya-Katya, unwavering faith in a bright future is replaced by faith in a morally pure past. Both are redeemed in the final scene, when Katya gives Sergei the photograph of the historic Katya in her white dress and her last letter, which never reached him.
The last sequence shows Sergei sitting alone with the photograph and letter, which his voice reads, voicing Katya’s hope and faith that he is still alive. In the final shot of the film, Sergei holds a magnifying glass over Katya’s smiling face in the photo taken of her when her prize was awarded. She stands in the middle of a row of colleagues in front of a round portrait of Stalin, which looms over the group, several times larger than life. The magnifying glass focuses on Katya’s face and blurs out the rest of the photo, but also visually repeats the framing of Stalin’s portrait, so that Katya becomes the dictator’s uncanny double. Both faithful girl martyr and ruthless dictator are immortalized as symbols of humanism, spirituality and traditional moral values that Russian authorities wish to encourage in the young generation.
Katya Lopatko
University of California, Santa Barbara
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Katya-Katya, Russia, 2023
Color, 99 minutes
Director: Anna Chernakova
Screenwriters: Aleksandr Adabashyan, Anna Chernakova
DoP: Mikhail Agranovich
Production Design: Aleksandr Adabashyan
Costume Design: Natal’ia Ivanova
Cast: Oliviia Kozlova, Ianina Zagorskaia, Ol’ga Bitiutskaia, Ivan Agapov, Natal’ia Akimova
Producer: Anna Chernakova
Production: Studia 1A
Anna Chernakova: Katya-Katya (2023) reviewed by Katya Lopatko © 2025 |