"We were eager to peep in and see just what was on inside the Kremlin walls. The whole world takes an interest in current Russian developments," Thomas Schreiber of the ARD said to a news conference.
Herr Schreiber is in charge of company political telecasts and features. He fell in for the idea of the film, brainchild of German journalists Natalia Kasperowitz and Erich Friedler, and the three of them were nurturing it for longer than two years before the companies got down to the project.
"It was the people-in-the-street for whom the classic writers Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy always had the greatest attention. We, too, were after showing the people-in-the-street. We wanted to show what the people who work at the Kremlin have in their heart and mind," added Herr Schreiber.
The film uses a rare technique-the sliding camera. Two giant cranes appeared in the Kremlin, with five cables stretched tight in between, along which the camera was sliding at an eighty-meter height, on a fully automated arrangement. The sophisticated ground-controlled gadgetry was first used in filming the Russian presidential inauguration of May 2004.
A Russian crew made the shooting in limited-admission parts of the Kremlin, while a German was engaged in the Alexander Garden, along the Kremlin wall on the outside, and the Kremlin Cathedral Square.
Minor Kremlin employees are heroes of the film-a cook, a sweeper, a security, a cleaning woman, and an electrician.
"I can't do much, but I want whatever I do to be to my country's benefit," says Gennadi Snegirev, Grand Kremlin Palace head electrician.
One episode concerns the routine of Gennadi Borzov, Kremlin star cleaner. The action of another is set at the Kremlin dining room, reigned by elderly chef Victor Zernov, who was holding the post throughout several regimes-under Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin.
It took close on a million Euros to make the film. It has been cast by now in Germany, France and Austria. German-based travel agencies braced up with a skyrocketing demand for Russian tours as soon as the movie appeared, the film crew proudly points out.
