GIVE ME LIBERTY

With equally desperate and hilarious moments, this movie is like an
American absurdist version of “Sorry We Missed You”. 

Director: Kirill Mikhanovsky | 2019 | USA | 110 mins | 15 | Some Russian subtitles

Q&A with Director Kirill Mikhanovsky (live link) ​

​Vic, a hapless young Russian American, drives a handicapped transport in Milwaukee where he shares an apartment with his grandfather. Already late on a day when street protests break out, Vic reluctantly agrees to ferry his grandfather and a dozen elderly Russians to a funeral, but they’re distressed when he stops first in a predominantly African American neighbourhood to pick up Tracy, a black woman with motor neurone disease. On the verge of being fired, Vic’s day goes from bad to worse.

DIRECTOR: KIRILL MIKHANOVSKY

A CONVERSATION WITH DIRECTOR KIRILL MIKHANOVSKY

Even though you do have some professional actors in the mix, you also cast many non-professionals. Where and how did you find all of this incredible talent?

For Victor, the main character, we had an eight-month long odyssey. A couple of years ago, we had a number of partners that were not a good fit for the project at the time, and someone proposed we try this one actor who almost looks like a real guy, like a non-actor walking in from the street, but he couldn’t do it, and then one thing led to another and before we knew it we were interviewing every living English-speaking actor on the planet between the ages of 18 and 30. I mean, we went through the whole cast of Dunkirk, it was insane! Then we looked around and thought to ourselves, “How did we get here? Didn’t we plan to work with a non- actor?” And luckily, luckily--we went so far as to propose the role to a couple of people, actors with faces and names--but luckily, thank God, for some reason things were turned down. They didn’t happen because, I don’t know, they were changing agencies or on the verge of “breaking out” and their agents advised them against doing a small movie in Milwaukee, etc. We just got lucky, my God, it’s just like the hand of God.
And so, eight months into the search, that’s when we had the chance of turning to Jen Venditti for help, who did a five-week search in the streets of New York. Jen ran into a young man in this baker’s shop in Brooklyn, who turned out to be quite interesting, and we met with him. He’d never had any training, but he ended updoing this role [Chris Galust]. We planned originally to give him two months to break in and drive the van and just live with some grandpa in Milwaukee and become this person. We ended up having only ten days [of prep] with him. The experience was quite brutal for him, because not only did we throw this little kid in the water, we expected him to swim faster than anyone else.