Новые планы фильма... снова
3 октября 2018 г.
On February 16, 2017, we announced on this website that Svetlana Migunova-Dali, co-owner of the Moscow based production house Logos Film Company, and Grace Loh, who is the head of the production company New Crime Productions in Hollywood, had an option on the rights to make a screen adaptation of The Master and Margarita.
Now we are informed that the Board of Trustees of the Russian Фонд Кино [Fond Kino] or the Federal Fund for Economic and social support of the Russian Cinematography, chaired by Vladimir Tolstoy, Adviser to the President of the Russian Federation on Culture, has approved a list of 17 films for which it will support the production in 2018 and 2019. One of the selected projects is a screen adaptation of The Master and Margarita.
The film which the Fund will support is not the one produced by Migunova-Dali and Loh, though. It's a new Russian project, for which director Nikolai Lebedev (°1966) wrote the script and will start shooting the film with a budget of 800 million rubles (10,5 million euro) in April 2019. It is assumed that the picture will be released in December 2020.
Of course, we know by experience that we should be very careful with announcements of screen adaptations of The Master and Margarita, since so many plans have never been realised. But this project will be produced by heavyweights like Konstantin Ernst (Russian Channel One), Igor Tolstunov (Profit), Leonard Blavatnik (Amedia Production) and Ruben Dishdishyan (Mars Media). So we may have something to look forward to.
Nikolai Lebedev