http://www.northjersey.com/topstories/hackensack/USS_Ling_in_Hackensack_is_setting_for_movie_about_doomed_Soviet_sub.html
USS Ling in Hackensack is setting for movie about doomed Soviet sub
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Last updated: Sunday October 24, 2010, 11:43 PM
BY EVONNE COUTROS
The Record
Staff Writer
HACKENSACK — It was “lights, camera, action!” as cast and crew of a Russian-language movie styled on “Taxi Driver” boarded the World War II-era submarine USS Ling this weekend to shoot flashback scenes about a real Soviet sub that sank off Hawaii 42 years ago.
The independent film “Katya,” about a middle-aged cab driver and former Soviet submarine navigator who meets a young Russian prostitute, is inspired by the Cold War sinking of the Soviet K-129 diesel-electric powered submarine on March 8, 1968 northwest of Oahu. Mystery still surrounds the demise of the sub, said to carry nuclear warheads.
“The Soviet submarine sank in the middle of the Pacific Ocean very close to Hawaii where it shouldn’t have been,” said filmmaker Mako Kamitsuna, 42, who wrote the 15-minute-long “Katya” as an original feature a few years ago. Kamitsuna managed to enlist actress Chulpan Khamatova — described by one of the film’s producers as the Angelina Jolie of Russia — for the title role of Katya.
“Something about the K-129 incident really captured my imagination,” said Kamitsuna, who was born in Houston, Texas, and raised in Hiroshima, Japan, the site of the drop of the first atomic bomb in 1945.
The daughter of an physician, Kamitsuna graduated Beverly Hills High School in California and earned a degree in philosophy from Columbia University in 1992. She attended the New York University Graduate Film program before deciding to make “Katya” with a budget of $60,000 funded through private equity. The cast of 30 are mostly Russian Americans – the dialogue is entirely in Russian with English subtitles – and the plan is to market it in Russia with hopes of going global.
The film is likened by Kamitsuna to the 1976 film “Taxi Driver,” directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro and a teenaged Jodie Foster.
”Through years of research, I’ve been exposed to enough clues that suggest that the K-129 had in fact attempted to launch one of the three nuclear warheads against Hawaii,” Kamitsuna wrote on a website promoting the film. “I was compelled to recreate the incident to highlight not so much the political implication but the very meaning of the deaths of ninety-eight men aboard — what each and every loss meant to their loved ones left behind, and to the generations to come.”
Filming aboard the USS Ling, which is on display at the New Jersey Naval Museum at Borg Park on River Street, was a local decision, Kamitsuna said.
“On our way to the city, we always pass it,” she said of drive-bys with her husband Roman Flom, whose parents live in Bergenfield.
Actor Vitaliy Shtabnoy, 23, of Hillsboro, is one of the leads, playing a Russian submariner, Mikhail (Katya’s father), aboard the ill-fated vessel, which was part of the Soviet Pacific Fleet.
Shtabnoy, who earned an undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering from Rutgers University in New Brunswick before turning to acting, lived in St. Petersburg with his parents until 1997.
“I came over when I was 10,” he said. “As an actor, this opens a new door for me … I have a different opportunity that other actors may not have because they don’t speak Russian.”
Kamitsuna hopes the small film — which wraps up today October 25 with scenes shot in Brooklyn — will get big notices at film festivals worldwide.
“This story has never been embraced, and I feel with the right spirit and attitude, it will speak to interested Russian people,” she said. “I’d like the message to be personal. My intention is that this film will be a bridge for discourse between two generations.”
