This comedy drama about St. Petersburg, a lost phone, and two people that cannot find each other is a 2000s classic and Oksana Bychkova’s debut film.
Masha (Ekaterina Fedulova) works in radio, and Maksim (Yevgeny Tsyganov) is a promising architect. She is about to get married and he has just split up with his girlfriend. Masha loses her phone in the street and Maksim, who finds it, keeps trying to return it to her. But she is busy with the wedding preparations and he is planning his upcoming move to Germany, so their meeting keeps getting postponed. Replanning and adjusting their trajectories, they miss and find each other in the streets of now sunny, now rainy St. Petersburg in summer.
Piter FM is an homage to Marlen Khutsiev’s July Rain (1966) with its storyline structure and long telephone conversations. It continues the tradition of filmic walks around St. Peterburg: it is light like Viktor Sokolov’s A Day Of Sun And Rain (1968) and circles the city streets like Aleksey Uchitel’s The Stroll (2003). It is also the debut that launched the career of Oksana Bychkova, one of the key women directors in Russian arthouse cinema. It captured the 2000s when they were full of hope and promise; when being odd was trendy and St. Peterburg seemed to be the best city on Earth.
Piter FM
Director: Oksana Bychkova
Russia, 2006. 86 min. 12+