Ruslan and Lyudmila

Who is good and who is evil in this fairytale opera - and why? The nucleus of Pushkin's setting of Ruslan and Lyudmila by Mikhail Glinka is the abduction of the princess's daughter Lyudmila from Kiev, the center of both the Russian and Ukrainian founding myths. For Ruslan, the warrior promised to her, this marks the beginning of an adventurous journey through the magical realm of a powerful dwarf. The rescue operation escalates into a showdown between the men fighting for Lyudmila. But she herself increasingly becomes a distant vision of love - the longed-for prize for heroism. In 1842, in the midst of the awakening Russian national sentiment, Glinka conceived the idea of a culturally united tsarist empire, in which he merged Slavic, Finnish and Arabic melos with the bel canto fashion of his time. Hungarian directors Alexandra Szemerédy and Magdolna Parditka look behind the magical façade of the legendary world and approach the characters with great curiosity for their most primal human fears, their emotional abrasions and abysses. They also follow trails that lead into authoritarian systems of yesterday and today - and ultimately end in a wedding. Or is the happy ending of this fairy tale pure utopia?