On Monday, September 19, the Rossiya 1 TV channel begins showing Anton Sievers' serial melodrama The Seagulls (Pregnancy Test, Amanat, Swing).
The tape tells the difficult story of the women's volleyball club from Kaliningrad.
Due to circumstances, he is forced to be headed by a new coach, Maxim Topol, performed by Mikhail Porechenkov.
His character is sharp, strong-willed, purposeful, in other words, has a full range of qualities that the Russian audience will appreciate and call the hero a “real man”.
Poplar steadfastly accepts blows and surprises of fate, does not reflect, but thoughtfully and, if necessary, firmly solves the problems that arise.
Among them are the appearance of an underage daughter, whom the hero did not even know about, the need to work with a "women's" team, and the betrayal of a companion.
He treats the team severely, not to say cruelly, but not out of empty tyranny, but solely for the sake of achieving the goal.
Mikhail Porechenkov said that, since the famous coach Nikolai Vasilyevich Karpol became the prototype of his character, in preparation for filming it was important to understand how a man who works with a women's volleyball team actually communicates with athletes, to develop a certain style of interaction with them.
“It seems to me that I felt my hero, understood.
He is a sharp, honest, straightforward person, passionate about his work, used to achieving his goals ... First, the Chaika volleyball team took shape in the script, and during the filming - both on the site and in the frame.
In recent days, we have been filming the most massive and dynamic scenes of games at the Russian Championship, the final of the Super League in volleyball.
And we experienced real adrenaline, tension and team spirit.
It was powerful!” Mikhail Porechenkov shared.
© Shot from the series "The Seagulls"
And the coach gets the team with a full set of surprises: here is the unsuccessful end of last season due to not the best line-up, and the departure of the previous coach Alexander (Yuri Chursin) to another league, and the complex characters of the athletes, especially the captain of the Seagulls Katya Malysheva (Alexandra Bogdanov), with whom (and, as a result, with the team) Topol initially had a conflict.
The solution of purely sporting tasks is closely intertwined with the need to unwind the tangle of life problems of all the characters.
“This is, first of all, a story about vocation, about what is behind the victories in big sport.
In general, I like to watch films about sports, although I myself worked with a sports theme for the first time on Chaika.
I immediately liked the script of the project, it is very lively, with many human lines.
There is a volleyball team united by a common goal, but the characters themselves are interesting, each with its own problems and trials.
Our picture combines different genres, it has most of all melodrama, but there is also a detective story, and drama, and a lot of humor…,” said Anton Sievers.
The series holds the attention well, delicately switching between numerous storylines and characters, without overloading with unnecessary details and without turning into a fussy kaleidoscope.
Separately, it is worth mentioning the brilliant study of the characters, which, thanks to a good cast, really come to life on the screen and do not look like decorations designed to set off the main characters.
Dramatic elements intelligently alternate with absolutely not vulgar and appropriate humor, very worldly and natural.
Filming of "Seagulls" took place in St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad and Moscow.
The main consultants and at the same time the coaches of the acting team were Anna Belova, the champion of the volleyball Major League A and Major League B of Russia for the 2020-2021 seasons (Severyanka, Cherepovets), and her husband Daniil Belov, founder and coach of the Belovevolley volleyball school.
The actresses who played the athletes trained for two months prior to filming and continued to improve their skills throughout the duration of the show.
“In preparation for filming and on the set, the current Russian volleyball champion worked with us all the time.
I confess that for me it was the first experience, before that I did not play volleyball.
The task before me was quite difficult, exciting, but the difficulties and challenges in my work always only spur me on, ”said Ravshana Kurkova.
It is quite possible that the idea of "The Seagulls" will seem banal to some viewers - there are plenty of sports dramas filmed both in Russia and abroad, and all of them, to one degree or another, are tailored to the same patterns.
Therefore, to remove something super-original within the framework of such a story is an almost impossible task.
But the authors of "The Seagulls" turned out to be a really good, high-quality series, when watching which the viewer will at least not experience a feeling of "Spanish shame."
The first season of the tape includes 16 episodes.