Celebrated Russian director Sergei Bondarchuk’s efforts to bring the prize-winning novel “And Quiet Flows the Don” to the big screen in the early 1990s fell apart after the Soviet collapse. More than a decade later, his work is finally about to see the light of day, after being completed by the director’s son Fyodor, a well-known Russian director in his own right.

Starring Britain’s Rupert Everett and US-born actor F. Murray Abraham, the film is due to premiere on November 7 as a seven-part series on Russian national television. The project was launched in 1989 by Italian producer Enzo Rispoli, who persuaded an Italian bank to invest $60 million (€47 million) to make a film out of Mikhail Sholokhov’s landmark Soviet novel.

Bondarchuk senior was offered the project as the author of another Soviet film classic — an 8-hour version of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”, which won the best foreign film Oscar in 1968. The filming of Sholokhov’s masterpiece lasted 11 months and finished three days before the coup of August 19, 1991, which helped seal the fate of the Soviet Union.

In 1994, the master tapes mysteriously disappeared and Sergei Bondarchuk died in Moscow without completing the film. Since then, his family and Russia’s Channel One television channel have searched for a copy of the film. Last year, after long negotiations with the film’s Italian partners, Channel One obtained the rights to the film in Russia and the former Soviet Union for the series. The Italian producer kept the rights for a feature version.

“Russia is whole again,” said scriptwriter Nikita Mikhalkov. In an interview with AFP, Mikhalkov compared the film’s recovery to the recent reburial of the remains of the mother of Russia’s last Tsar in Saint Petersburg.

The seven-part series was edited by Fyodor Bondarchuk, director and author of Russia’s blockbuster film “Company 9” about the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan. Work on the Sholokhov classic was an emotional challenge for Bondarchuk junior, who was quarrelling with his father at the time of shooting the original version.

Blending a love story and war, the film has a strong plot, despite its sometimes irregular pace and the unexpected appearance of US stars on the banks of the River Don.

Even if the actors, many of them Russian, speak English, Grigory Melekhov, one of the Cossacks, who is played by Rupert Everett, quickly wins over the audience.

The Cossacks, tough peasant soldiers who were dispatched to settle the southern steppe regions of the Russian empire to patrol against incursions, are famed for their military prowess and hearty lifestyle.

At ease with the low ceilings of a traditional Cossack house, Melekhov, or Everett, swallows interminable glasses of brandy. But French actress Delphine Forest is less convincing, walking a little too freely in the village with a bare head, inconceivable behavior for a Cossack.

The Cossacks were immortalized by Sholokhov’s epic, written between 1928 and 1940, which follows the fortunes of the Cossack fighter Melekhov amid the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Civil War.

The film is a collaboration but some might say that is apt for a book some believe could not have been written alone by Sholokhov, who won the 1965 Nobel prize for literature.

Rumors persist in Russia that the book was in fact based on the private diary of a Cossack officer that fell into the hands of Sholokhov as a young man.

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