Upon returning to a war-torn Leningrad, Nadezhda Kosheverova filmed a fairytale. With Zolushka she turned her back on reality and took a resolutely aesthetic perspective. Faithful to individuals and ideas, she surrounded herself with close collaborators and longtime friends. Evgeny Schwartz, who wrote the screenplay, wrote plays that incorporated fairytale elements with contemporary allusions – and his vitriolic humour earned him numerous bans. He wasn’t taking that risk with Zolushka but, instead of making a fairytale that conformed to the dominant ideology, as Aleksandr Ptushko was doing in his films, he wrote lines that would delight Soviet audiences for a long time afterwards. Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz