Peter Greenaway plans new film about Russia’s Volga region

British film director Peter Greenaway is set to make a film about Russia’s Volga region based on the travel writing of 19th Century French author Alexandre Dumas, the film’s producers announced today. Focussing on the “multinational, multi-confessional and polyethnic nature of the region,” the film, which is scheduled to start filming in 2016, will also overview Russia’s past and present “as a country located on the border between Europe and Asia”.

The forthcoming film will feature historical events taken from Dumas’s 1858 book Adventures in Czarist Russia, or From Paris to Astrakhan alongside representations of contemporary life on the Volga, and will “interweave culture and art, literature and propaganda”. Dumas, who is best known for his novel The Three Musketeers, first travelled to Russia in 1858 where he lived for two years.

Greenway’s most recent film Eisenstein in Guanajuato outraged Russian film critics when it premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year for suggesting that the prolific Soviet film director on which the film is based had a gay affair.