An audience of the Presidential Library Cinema Club gave a look in “A skylight to Paris” by Lev Sidorovsky

The Presidential Library Cinema Club has met this time to watch and to discuss a movie entitled “A skylight to Paris” by a journalist Lev Sidorovsky, who is laureate of international and all-Union competitions, Honored Worker of Culture of Russia Lev Sidorovsky, whose name is assigned to the small planet of the Solar System.

“A skylight to Paris” is a very personal story about how once the authors of the film (just like the heroes of Yuri Mamin’s movie “A window to Paris”), when they suddenly discovered the Eiffel Tower outside of the window of their apartment in St. Petersburg, stepped over the windowsill and found themselves in the atmosphere of an amazing city, which everyone looked at his own way. They got such place where, in the author’s words, “the air is violet, where the buildings, and not only castles, of a golden-ash color proper to an old stone, where the small streets are lined with the paving stones and intersect with downtown — this city is incomparable to any other.”

Lev Sidorovsky first took camera in his arms in 1997 in Paris. But then, according to him, it was the work of a beginner who understood a little in visual culture. 10 years later, he came to this city again, already owning a video camera and understanding what and how he wants to film. Along with his wife Tatiana they were getting ready for future travel for a long time: they have read everything that was possible, learned a map of Paris almost by heart — given that they will have only seven days for shooting.

Lev Sidorovsky appeared in the movie as a screenwriter, a commentator, a cameraman and a film director. His camera captures not only the familiar around the world sights of Paris, but above the all these corners of the city, each of which has some interesting history.

The wife Tatiana, who is also a co-author of the movie, stops near a house where the actor Gérard Philipe once lived. Sidorovsky immediately remembers about the meeting with “Fanfan Tulip” in the column hall of the Leningrad University. And this little courtyard is not listed in travel guides, yet George Sand lived here. “If so, — the authors of the movie suggest in the frame, — the house of Frederic Chopin should be near,” — and for sure, an outbuilding with a commemorative plaque is nearby. Luxembourg Palace, the Museum of d’Orsay, Montparnasse, the bohemian restaurant “Rotunda”… A separate novel in the film is a story about the life and work of Yves Montand and Simone Signoret. An alert camera of Lev Sidorovsky also “peeped” Paris through the eyes of Russian diaspora in emigration — Bunin, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam.

At the end of the movie the author, who became a professional film traveler after his retirement (he released 48 films!), not without some sadness, observes: “The French say: to leave means to die a little.” But Paris can indeed remain “a life long holiday which is always with you,” if you manage to enter into a dialogue with this city, as the patriarch of Leningrad and St. Petersburg journalism Lev Sidorovsky did.