The Russian "maestro" Andrei Konchalovsky received the Silver Lion as Best Director during the award ceremony of the 71th Venice Film Festival.

Born in Moscow, Konchalovsky was very successful during the festival in the lagoon city, his movie The House of Fools won the Jury Grand Prix of the Venice film festival in 2002 and he was the screenwriter on Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood," which won the Venice Golden Lion in 1962.

During an interview with Xinhua on Saturday Konchalovsky talked about his goal with this movie, He said "first of all my film is about people then I got inspired by the two masters Anton Cechov and Robert Bresson."

The plot is centred on the true story of Aleksey Tryaptisyn, a real life postman based in a remote Russian village immerse in an astonishing nature surrounding the Kenozero lake. Thanks to a cast largely composed of non-professional locals acting out their daily lives the movie shows the with irony the immutability of a Russian isolated village

The Russian maestro was as usual "difficult" when asked to comment on his movie and for his every interpretation is good "I simply liked it and I don't want to rationalize on things that could be false, when you go inside of something it's always interesting unless you are a boring story teller. Once Cechov said that he could write a brilliant story on an ashtray, he wanted to say that there are not boring stories about anything" he said with modesty.

Talking about his method to elaborate the script called searching for subjects he explained that now the life of a movie director is easier, he said "ten years ago the surgery techniques were quite invasive now an endoscopy can go inside the body and leave you will very little scarfs."

"Now new technologies in Cinema ate giving you the opportunity to go inside of everything, inside of life, register it and then find extraordinary things that you wouldn't be able to do even ten years ago. Light, camera, ciak, stop, cut all that doesn't exist anymore; now you can put a camera and shoot men's life 24 hours and then pick up just what you need."He continued.

He makes then some consideration about his profession "First I don't watch film, then everyone bring as a director his own dream and desire to share emotions; all directors are basically naïf people like me." I play on three strings, like the Russian author Alexander Pushkin said: fear, laughter and tears and there is no other music, like three Greek masques comedy, tragedy and drama. He explained.

Questioned about his relation with his famous brother the actor and movie director Nikita Mikhalkov, he said smiling "we don't work together but we live together which is much more important; we fight and discuss, he is very productive and a great artist with its own principles. Sometimes I think he is wrong and vice versa that's why we are self-sufficient."

Very active not only in cinema, the Russian master explained his future plans, he said "right now I'm doing theater plays and the next thing I'm doing is Sophocles in Italy."

Asked about his favorite Chinese movie directors he put the accent more on poetry "about China, more than the movie directors, I like their perception of space and eastern perception of the world which is not dialectic. Chinese poetry in that sense doesn't show emotions but it is very dramatic and very deep, So we have to learn from a lot from them."

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