Rusalka (Mermaid) is a film about an introverted girl from a seaside village who has lost her ability to speak. When her village is destroyed by a cyclone, she moves to Moscow with her mother and grandmother.
At the age of 17 and struggling with the pitfalls of life in the big city, she finds a simple job that doesn't require her to speak to people: handing out leaflets wearing an oversized cell-phone costume. But when she falls in love with Alexander her life takes a different turn.
The movie was chosen from eight contenders by a secret ballot that followed an open discussion. Only films released in Russia from October 1, 2007, to September 30, 2008, could be nominated for the world's most prestigious movie awards.
Russian movies have so far received six Oscars: "Moscow Strikes Back," a documentary by Leonid Varlamov and Ilya Kopalin (1942); "War and Peace" by Sergei Bondarchuk (1968), "Dersu Uzala" by Akira Kurosawa (joint Soviet-Japanese production, 1975); "Moscow Does Not Believe In Tears" by Vladimir Menshov (1980); "Burnt By the Sun" by Nikita Mikhalkov (1994); and "The Old Man and the Sea," a short animated movie by Alexander Petrov (1999).
