painted and drew, painted and drew, painted... She had just one request, “Irakli, when you come, please bring pastels, acrylics, canvases and brushes”. One more quotation from Marina Tsvetayeva. The character in The Tale of Sonechka says: “There are things that a man cannot understand in a woman, not because they are below or above a man’s understanding, that is not the case, but because some things one can understand only from within... I am unable to be a woman. So, this small thing, the male inside me, is unable to understand that little thing, the female in you”. The Kazakh dawn was breaking. The Alatau mountains emerged from the darkness of the night and moved towards Alma-Ata. The snowy peaks were glowing in the rays of the yet unseen sun. Every day, Toma Stenko gets up before dawn, in darkness descends down to the fourth floor, and opens someone else’s apartment with someone else’s keys, steps towards the blank canvass and starts painting, and keeps painting on and on. One day, four years ago, she decided to make films and enrolled at the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors. She has made the following films: Wandering around Berlin, The Goatfish, The Telescope, Scream, The Beauty of Silence. They were screened at international film festivals and won numerous prizes. However, for Stenko, her brushes and colours, her canvases, her solitude, her war with the line, colour and form is far more important than Cannes and other red-carpet events. I want to tell you about just one film, The Goatfish about how it was made. My friend Sergei Sarkisov gave her a
small video camera. Toma roamed with it along Adler’s cold seashore. And she saw a big motorboat and six men trying to start up its motor. They were fishermen bound for night goatfish fishing. Toma asked them to take her along, and they shooed her away as, “a woman at fishing is a disaster”. But Toma is always able to persuade. The fishermen reluctantly assented. Early next morning the boat returned home, carrying the season’s record- breaking catch. Toma was shooting the whole night and day; she edited the footage for a week, and finally there was a documentary born about six hermits spiritually akin to Christ’s apostles, who sail the sea, and it seems that the goatfish fall from the sky into their boat. Amazingly simple film that got a whole bouquet of prizes. The Kazakh day is in full bloom, and I’d like to tell you much more about the artist, but I have to send the preface to the printing office in Moscow. The phone rings. Toma Stenko says, “Irakli, I cheated on Picasso, I fell in love with Modigliani. He was thirty- five when he died... He was impoverished, he did not sell a single painting in his lifetime. Nowadays they are estimated at 180 million euros. But it’s not millions that count, just look at his photo, look into his eyes and you will see everything”. My phone’s screen displayed the face of Modigliani, with stubble, exhausted. I have never seen Modigliani like this before. Toma Stenko was beside him. It was a collage: Modigliani and Stenko holding bunches of grapes.
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