RUSSIAN POET’S 1ST FILM BEGINS U.S. RUN, AT LAST

Noting pleasure in the fact that “an old friend is moving into a new medium,” the reclusive Warren Beatty made a rare public appearance here this week to introduce a film by a first-time film maker--famed Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Beatty reminisced with an audience of several hundred at downtown Manhattan’s Film Forum on Wednesday about how in Moscow in the 1960s, “as a young actor with very much longer hair,” he was mistaken for Yevtushenko, then a new star on the Russian literary horizon, and mobbed by a crowd of Muscovites.

Beatty then introduced the Russian poet and his first film, “Kindergarten,” which began its American premiere engagement at the Film Forum that evening.

The 143-minute semi-autobiographical film about the adventures of a boy growing up in the Soviet Union during World War II, received favorable reviews for its exuberant use of songs, poetry and surreal images. It screened in Los Angeles at Filmex last year.

However, Yevtushenko said this week that it’s taken nearly a year to find a U.S. distributor for the film. The film, distributed by International Film Exchange, is scheduled for theatrical release in Los Angeles in the spring.

Yevtushenko expressed particular disappointment that in today’s “cold war” climate, more films are not shown in both the United States and the Soviet Union that “show our people as they really are.”

He said he was trying to show the Soviet people in this light in “Kindergarten.” He denounced such recent American films as “Rambo: First Blood, Part II” and “Red Dawn” for their unfavorable treatment of the Soviet Union. He also noted that there are many “beautiful American films” that are not shown in Russia.

“In both (film) industries, there is a lot of room for more mutual understanding, and even co-production,” he said.

“I have knocked on many Hollywood doors in vain, and I have found that American censorship can be as strong and tough as Soviet censorship,” Yevtushenko said at an earlier press conference at the Film Forum.

He was referring to reactions both by potential Hollywood distributors of “Kindergarten” and by representatives of the major film studios to whom he said he has taken a second film project.

“Most say that my kinds of films are too clever for a mass audience with primitive tastes,” Yevtushenko said, “but I think it’s the film makers, producers and studios who create bad taste in audiences. It’s a vicious circle.”

Yevtushenko, who came to world attention in the ‘60s as a poet, said his second film project will be a retelling of the Three Musketeers story in which the Musketeers in old age “rebel” against violence.

Having written the script, he is seeking financing outside the Soviet Union--”Kindergarten” was made in the Soviet Union for less than $1 million--because of the scale and cost of the project.

“I don’t want to dedicate the rest of my life to cinema, and it is certainly a struggle (getting a movie made). But cinema does have the advantage of reaching a very wide audience,” said the 50-year-old poet.

“I do believe in the power of art, and the art of the cinema can show peoples’ real faces,” he said.