CAST: Anatoli- Alexandre Lazarev (Moscow); Lena/VIka, the hooker - Tetiana Kryvytska (Kyiv); Dima, Anatoli’s friend  - Yevhen Pashyn (Kyiv); Kostia, the contract killer - Kostiantyn Kostyshyn (Kyiv); Marina, Kostia’s wife - Yelena Korikova (Moscow); Katia, Anatoli’s wife - Anzhelika Nevolina (St. Petersburg); Ivan, Kostia’s contract killer - Serhiy Romaniuk (Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine).

Director: Vyacheslav Kryshtofovych (Krishtofovich)

Producers: Mykola Mashchenko, Pierre Rival, screenplay: Andrei Kourkov

cinematography: Vilen Kaluta, music: Volodymyr Hronsky

Co-Produced by  Compagnie des films, National Dovzhenko Film Studios, Compagnie Est-Ouest, Kazakhstan Aimanov Film Factory.

DIRECTOR’S BIO:  Vyacheslav Krystofovych (Krishtofovich) was born into a Ukrainian-Polish family in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1947. During secondary school, he developed an interest in filmmaking, and subsequently enrolled in the Kyiv Theatrical Institute at the age of 18, where he studied directing. After graduating from film school in 1971, Krystofovych began his directing career at the Dovzhenko Studios in Kyiv. Between 1975 and 1985 he directed six television films, including "His Own Happiness" (1979), winner of a Special Jury Prize at the USSR Festival of Television Films; "Two Hussars" (1984), based on a Tolstoy story; and "Volodya the Big, Volodya the Small" (1985), adapted from the work of Anton Chekhov.

Krystofovych’s first theatrical feature, "Single Woman Seeks Lifetime Companion" (1986), won a Best Actress award for Irina Kouptchenko at the Montreal Film Festival. His second theatrical film was "Self-Portrait of an Unknown Person" (1988). His film, "Adam's Rib" (1991), was enthusiastically received at the Cannes, Toronto, Montreal and New York Film Festivals, and was distributed in Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and the U.S.

Krystofovych currently works at Dovzhenko Studios in Kyiv.

FILMOGRAPHY: 1986  SINGLE WOMAN SEEKS LIFETIME COMPANION, Best Actress Award for Irina Kouptchenko,

Montreal Film Festival.

1988  SELF-PORTRAIT OF AN UNKNOWN PERSON

 1991  ADAM'S RIB, Official Selection, Directors' Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival

Audience Award, Montreal Film Festival

1997  A FRIEND OF THE DECEASED

Krystofovych about himself:

"I received a mainly Russian education," Krishtofovich comments, "but I have always considered myself to be a Ukrainian. It's difficult to explain, but, except for my work as a student, I have never before chosen specifically Ukrainian material for my projects. All my films have been made in the Russian language, but I do believe you can find a piece of my Ukrainian soul in each of them.".

From introduction to the film by Yuri Shevchuk: The Orange Revolution has triumphed. A new democratic, freedom-loving Ukraine is just around the corner, right? Not quite so fast. Enter reality. Today Ukraine is afflicted with corruption, degradation of human values, decline of culture and morality, sucked dry by criminals in high places. The enormity of the challenge of doing away with this legacy is beyond imagination.

“A Friend of the Deceased” invites the public to take a sober view of the Ukrainian society as it enters the first days of the Yushchenko presidency. The event will showcase “A Friend of the Deceased”, the film by Vyacheslav Kryshtofovych. Made in 1997, it portrays a society that, deep down, bears a disturbingly close resemblance to today’s Ukraine.

What do you do when you are a young well-educated urban Ukrainian man, who cannot find a job, any job, whose beloved wife is openly cheating on you, and would not divorce you out of pity? You hire a contract killer, and pay him to kill … you. Tolia, an all-Ukrainian denizen of Kyiv is trapped in a lawless, hypocritical, and cruel society. He is about to give up fighting and commit suicide by proxy. But at the very verge of the abyss, he peers down, steps back and fights. Will Tolia win, will Ukraine win? It is anybody’s guess. Kryshtofovych said in an interview that he did not mean this film as any kind of metaphor for the Ukrainian condition circa 1997, but the viewer who is all too well familiar with the “reality on the ground” will be sorely tempted to see exactly such a metaphor.

“A Friend of the Deceased” is a crime story that brings to high relief the sick post-Soviet Ukrainian society where one has to lie, cheat, betray, and even kill in order to be successful, where human virtue is worthless and murder is just another type of business, well-paid and even respectable. Call it film-noir Kyiv style. “A Friend of the Deceased” based on the novel and screenplay by the acclaimed crime writer from Kyiv Andriy Kurkov is not all gloom and doom, but it is definitely anti-poetic in its stark, wry, and shocking realism. The film is also strangely optimistic in its implied, unspoken belief in the triumph of humanity.