Actor-director Fedor Bondarchuk’s $30m war spectacle Stalingrad has had the strongest opening ever for a locally produced film with $14.3m takings from 1,400 screens across Russia on its first weekend.

Distributed in Russia and Ukraine by Sony Pictures Releasing International (SPRI), the production by Alexander Rodnyansky and Sergey Melkumov’s Non-Stop Production and Dmitry Rudovsky’s Art Pictures is also Russia’s first release in the IMAX 3D format and its official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film category at the forthcoming Academy Awards.

The film, which features a dramatic love story against the backdrop of the 1942 Battle of Stalingrad, stars Petr Fedorov, Dmitriy Lysenkov, Alexey Barabash, Andrey Smolyakov, Maria Smolnikova and German actors Thomas Kretschmann and Heiner Lauterbach.

The film has attracted mixed reviews with some critics comparing the film to a video game, arguing that the special effects are too prominent, while others have praised the film for matching the technical levels of Hollywood blockbusters.

The Russian website Kinopoisk calculated a 66% rating for the film from the Russian critics’ opinions and placed Stalingrad at number 127 in the top-selling titles. Afghanistan war film The 9th Company, the producers’ first collaboration with Bondarchuk, is in the number 43 slot at $25.5m.

An online service in today’s Volgograd (known as Stalingrad from 1925 to 1961) fielded views from veterans of the battle of Stalingrad who attended screenings of the Bondarchuk’s film. While the majority of the responses were positive, some veterans who had served during the battle felt that the film was not a true representation of the Red Army’s experiences.

No backing for Tchaikovsky biopic

New films by directors Pavel Lungin and Kirill Serebrennikov were not among 36 projects awarded 3 billion Roubles ($93m) by Russia’s Cinema Fund (Fond Kino) as production support in its latest round of funding for independent production companies not in the list of so-called “leaders”.

Lungin had submitted his planned English-language version of Pushkin’s Queen Of Spades, which has been adapted for the screen by The King’s Speech screenwriter David Seidler and was pictched at the Moscow Business Square in July.

Serebrennikov, on the other hand, had been looking for support from the Cinema Fund for his biopic of the composer Petr Tchaikovsky.

Malyshev said that the production company had applied for $2.2m towards its $7.4m budget ($930,000 had already been granted by the Ministry of Culture), but according to his figures, the production company had only managed to recoup $2.2m from its previous films in the past 10 years.

Among the projects supported was 3D animation sequel The Snow Queen 2: The Snow King and Alexander Mindadze’s Lovely Hans, Dear Peter as well as the theatrical distribution for such new releases as the award-winning The Geographer Drank His Globe Away.

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