Original title: Moya lyubov

Based on: Novel “Istoriya Lyubovnaya” (A Love Story, 1927) by Ivan Shmelyov

Director: Aleksandr Petrov

Screenplay: Aleksandr Petrov, based on the novel by Ivan Shmelyov

Cinematography: Sergey Reshetnikov

Music: Denis L. Chartrand, Normand Roger

Cast: Aleksandr Palamishev, Aleksandra Zhivova, Evgeniya Kryukova, Nina Ruslanova, Sergey Garmash, Aleksandr Oleshko, Ekaterina Afrikantova, Yuliya Artemova, Ivan Dobrynin, Mikhail Lukashov

Filming locations: Yaroslavl, Russia

Subtitles: English (EN), Romanian (RO)

Synopsis and Main Themes: In nineteenth-century Russia, a sixteen-year-old boy named Anton spends a summer caught between two very different women: Pasha, a gentle servant girl from his own household, and Serafima, an older, elusive neighbor whose presence unsettles him in ways he cannot yet name. The film follows the awakening of first love in all its confusion — the pull toward purity and the pull toward desire, the gap between what a young man imagines love to be and what he discovers it actually demands of him.

About the Director and Cinematic Style: My Love is Petrov’s most personal and most technically refined work. Returning to Yaroslavl after The Old Man and the Sea, he spent three years completing a twenty-six-minute film with a team of four animators, carrying further than in any previous film his attention to the truth of human gesture and emotion. The result is a film of unusual warmth and painterly density, in which the textures of a Moscow summer — light on water, dust in a courtyard, the weight of an afternoon — are rendered with the same care Petrov had previously given to the open ocean.

Critical Reception and Impact: My Love premiered at the Hiroshima International Animation Festival (2006), where it won both the Audience Prize and the Special International Jury Prize. It took the Grand Prix, Best Direction, and Best Visuals at the 12th Open Russian Festival of Animated Film (2007), and the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Animation at the International Leipzig Festival (2006). It was released theatrically in Japan by Studio Ghibli as the inaugural title in their Ghibli Museum Library. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 80th ceremony (2008), where the prize went to Peter and the Wolf directed by Suzie Templeton.

Historical Context and Cinematic Legacy: Ivan Shmelyov wrote A Love Story in 1927 as an émigré in France, looking back at a pre-revolutionary Russian childhood with a mixture of nostalgia and lucidity. The novel belongs to a tradition of first-love narratives in Russian literature — most directly echoing Turgenev’s First Love (1860) — in which adolescent desire becomes the lens through which a world is seen for the first time in its true complexity. Petrov’s adaptation arrived as his most ambitious narrative undertaking, and also his most debated: critics including Yuri Norstein questioned whether the film’s extraordinary visual refinement had come at the expense of emotional depth. That debate — about the limits of painterly perfection as a vehicle for feeling — remains the most interesting critical conversation his work has generated, and My Love sits at its center.