Film about stickleback that saved Leningrad natives during the blockade has been discussed at the Presidential Library’s cinema club

The uniqueness of the situation is that in the fierce blockade winter in Leningrad rivers and canals only this small nondescript fish survived; it was caught with baskets, bags, nets - to survive ... In 1957, veterans installed a memorial sign "To Blockade Stickleback" in Kronstadt.

The 105th Presidential Library’s cinema club meeting, devoted to the World Animal Day, was held at the Presidential Library. On this day, the audience was traditionally invited to a meeting with the biologist Pavel Glazkov, a naturalist, a Candidate of Biological Sciences, keeping a video blog “Two of Every Kind” which tells about animals living in Leningrad Region. This time, two premieres of the films - "Stickleback" and "Wood-Grouse" took place at the Presidential Library. Both works showed that Pavel Glazkov rose in his work to a new level - operators Alexander Medvedev, Dmitry Skobelev and Anton Kazistov were attracted to work on the films, which impacted on the level of the visual imagery of the film: it simply conquers the viewer with the picturesque beauty of filming and trusting nature of director biologist.

Underwater filming of "Stickleback" was made by Glazkov himself, going down to the bottom of the White Sea with an aqualung. The observation of the stickleback was then continued ashore in the laboratories of the biological stations of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the St. Petersburg State University.

“This ordinary fish for Leningrad natives has a special relationship”, - says author Pavel Glazkov, first on camera and then at the microphone in the multimedia hall of the Presidential Library. - In peacetime, it was considered "weedy", people did not eat it. But when the food supplies finished, the people in Leningrad began to get a stickleback from the Neva, its tributaries and canals. From a small fish they cooked the ear, twisted it into cutlets. It helped Leningrad natives to survive during the war…

The film “Wood-Grouse” begins with the February snow-covered forest on camera, where the author of the film wanders in search of wood-grouse. The mating season among birds is not earlier than April, but the author is no longer eager to determine the location of future filming by special signs. Here is April, camera operator Alexander Medvedev slips after the sun shining through the forest, shows the aggressive behavior of the wood-grouse in the fight for the female, when the birds are sometimes able to shake each other to death. During this period, they sometimes even pounce on the person.

The wood-grouse’s place of living is described in the film, Leningrad Region, the environs of Tomsk, Kostroma, Khanty-Mansiysk, Chelyabinsk Region and Yakutia.

“I try to show not only the beauty of nature, but also its vulnerability”, - said Pavel Glazkov during the discussion of films. - The only individual that harms is a human, a part of the animal world. We are bad neighbors: not so long ago a woodcock fell dead at my feet after the sound of a blow. It turned out that after repairing the building, large windows were installed on the facade; birds in the process of migration to the south fly through the city the same path - and do not have time to orient in flight, they are beating on the glass, which reflects the sky. It is necessary to urgently change a human-being in a relationship with living nature, because he is a human-being.