House with a Turret

Dom s bashenkoy

Eva Neymann’s moving and poetic account of a 9-year-old boy’s journey home to Ukraine after the outbreak of the Second World War.

Even if a screening is sold out, tickets are often available 30 minutes before the start of the film at the box office at each venue.


Image gallery

  • Director-Screenwriter Eva Neymann
  • Producer Aleksander Tkachenko, Stanislav Zurahov
  • With Dmitriy Kobetskoy, Katerina Golubeva, Mikhail Veksler
  • Ukraine 2011
  • 81 mins
  • Sales WIDE

Friedrich Gorenstein’s semi-autobiographical story House with a Turret was first published in 1964. The author of many (mainly unfilmed) screenplays, he later collaborated with Tarkovsky on the script of Solaris. In her second feature based on Gorenstein’s work, Eva Neymann presents the war years through the eyes of a 9-year-old boy travelling home to Kiev with his mother in the early years of the Second World War. As in Gorenstein’s own experience, the mother tells him that, if anything should happen, he should find the street where they lived and search for the house with a turret. Strongly empathic, the film creates a sense of immediacy in his experience of the world and the people around him. Striking black-and-white photography (by Lithuanian cinematographer Rimvydas Leipus) achieves a convincing reconstruction both moving and poetic. Dimitry Kobetskoy, cast as the boy, was discovered in an orphanage in Odessa.
Peter Hames

Director statement

The starting point of [author Friedrich] Gorenstein is pain, hurt and anger. And also an incredible humanity and longing for human warmth that haven’t let me go for many years since I first read his Old Ladies and House with a Turret in 2001. And for all these years I have had a very strong desire to make films based on this prose. Regarding House with a Turret, obviously the material was waiting for me. Among those who also wanted to film it before were Yuri Klepikov and Gorenstein’s close friend Andrei Tarkovsky. The novel is a key story in Gorenstein’s oeuvre. The main character is a little boy, based on Gorenstein himself, who endures real ordeals and suffering.
Eva Neymann

Director biography

Born in 1974 in Zaporozhje, Ukraine, she emigrated to Germany in 1993, studied law at the Philipps Universität in Marburg, and graduated in 2007 from the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie, Berlin, the city in which she currently lives. A former assistant to Kira Muratova (on the Odessa-based production of Second Class Citizens in 2001), she built experience in documentary work before emerging in 2007 with her first fiction feature, the LFF-screened At the River. House with a Turret is thus her second feature film to be based on the works of writer Friedrich Gorenstein.

Filmography

1996 Chrysanthemen in Gelb [s]
2000 Chronik eines Abschieds [s]
2001 Samri Otomri [s]
2002 Paradise [s]
2004 Wse po-staromu (Just Like Old Times) [doc]
2005 Das Meer sehen [TV doc s]
2007 Wege Gottes (God’s Ways) [doc]; U reki (At the River)
2012 Dom s bashenkoy (House With a Turret)