Константин Воскресенский – Film Screenplay. The Adventures of Kesha the Russian Boy (страница 1)

Константин Дмитриевич Воскресенский

Film Screenplay. The Adventures of Kesha the Russian Boy

Written by Konstantin Voskresenskiy

Based on the autobiography by Konstantin Voskresenskiy

Adapted for screen

Genre: Adventure / Drama / Coming-of-Age

Format: Feature Film

Runtime: 110–120 minutes

Rating: 16+

LOGLINE: In the chaotic aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a stuttering, reckless boy named Kesha survives drowning, trains, elevators, military bases, and his own worst impulses – only to discover that the hardest thing to survive is growing up, and that the bottom is always closer than you think.

TAGLINE: A man is a boy who survived by accident.

Contact: voskon@gmail.com | Phone: +7 916 825 9840

Telegram: @Konstantin_Voskresenskiy

Revision Date: February 2026 | Draft: Third Draft

Explication – Director’s Vision

Written by Konstantin Voskresenskiy | February 2026

1. Theme

This is a film about the price of survival – and what it costs a boy to become a man when no one shows him how.

Set against the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos of the 1990s, the story asks a simple but devastating question: what happens to a child who is loved imperfectly, abandoned casually, and never told the truth – and who somehow turns all of that into a life worth living?

At its deepest level, this is a film about fathers and sons: the father who died before he could speak, and the son who spends his whole life finding his own words.

2. Idea / Super-Objective

The film’s super-objective: a man is not the sum of what was done to him, but the sum of what he chose to do next.

Kesha does not triumph over his circumstances. He absorbs them, converts them, and carries them forward. His stutter is not cured. His father does not come back. But by the end, he is standing on the same balcony where he grew up – and instead of running, he goes inside and adjusts his daughter’s blanket. That is the victory. Small, quiet, and absolute.

3. Conflict

EXTERNAL: Kesha vs. a country falling apart – Soviet institutions, absent parents, indifferent bureaucracies, the lawless 1990s. The world keeps removing the floor; he keeps finding new ground.

INTERNAL: Kesha vs. himself – reckless, stuttering, capable of tenderness and cruelty in the same afternoon. He fights shame, impulse, and the inability to ask for help.

INVISIBLE: Kesha vs. his dead father. Dmitriy’s absence structures the entire film. A letter never sent. A truth hidden for sixteen years. A son who becomes the father his father never got to be – without knowing that is what he is doing.

4. Main Characters

KESHA (KONSTANTIN VOSKRESENSKIY) – age 0 to 26. An engine disguised as a child: curious, reckless, resourceful, morally inconsistent, possessed of stubbornness that reads as courage until it reads as stupidity, and then, quietly, as courage again. His stutter is not merely a speech impediment – it is the physical manifestation of everything he cannot say: grief, need, love, apology. Throughline: survive – be free – be worthy of his daughter.

DMITRIY VOSKRESENSKIY (the father) – age 19 at death. Present only through absence. Writing letters his son will never receive. His death – five bullet wounds stamped as "fever" – is the wound Kesha must metabolize before he can become a father himself.

MOTHER – not a villain. A young woman who lost a husband at 22 and spent the next decade trying to stay afloat. Capable of love and neglect in the same afternoon.

STEPFATHER (SERGEY) – quiet, decent, never violent, emotionally absent. A study in the limits of good intentions: he gives Kesha space to grow up alone – which is both gift and wound.

GRANDMOTHER MARINA – formidable, loyal, Soviet steel with a human core. The family axis. She carries the truth about Dmitriy until Kesha is old enough to bear it.

GRANDFATHER NIKOLAY – a man unmade by grief and slowly remaking himself. His restraint is the film’s model of Soviet masculinity – and its damage.

5. Secondary Characters

ROMA – first accomplice; childhood freedom before consequence.

ZHENYA & ALEXEY – the "capitalism of survival" partners.

LT. COL. YARKIN – authority without cruelty; the father-shaped imprint.

MARIA (wife) – chosen life, not survived life; triggers the final emotional beat.

THE KITTEN – not a secondary character. A moral event.

6. Visual & Stylistic Concept

TONE: Warm, funny, occasionally heartbreaking – never sentimental. In the spirit of Jojo Rabbit meets Cinema Paradiso, filtered through a distinctly Russian sensibility.

COLOUR PALETTE (three registers):

– Childhood (1985–1995): warm, saturated – Soviet kitchens, blue-flower wallpaper, firelight, summer glare.

– Teens / 1990s: cooler grey-green – industrial dusk, railway platforms, empty courtyards.

– Adult frame: neutral, quiet, minimal – the calm after survival.

CAMERA: Handheld in childhood (the world moves because he moves), steadier with age. Close on faces for truth; wide in nature (pea fields, rivers, forests) to emphasise scale – the world is enormous, the boy is small.

7. Sound Design & Music

SCORE: Original soundtrack composed by Peter Svetlichnyi. A completed score for the autobiographical source material already exists, providing a musical foundation deeply embedded in the emotional DNA of the story.

MUSICAL CONCEPT:

– Childhood motifs: light, slightly ironic Soviet-era melodic themes, growing more complex as Kesha ages.

– Emotional weight: sparse piano and strings for pivotal scenes (the kitten; the father revelation; the Oka River).

– Adult frame: minimal, near-silent – the sound of having survived.

SOUND DESIGN: When the stutter locks, the world subtly muffles – a subjective, underwater quality pulling the audience into Kesha’s paralysis. Silence is structural: five seconds of black screen after the kitten scene carry no sound at all. Adult Kesha V.O. is warm but distant – a man speaking from the far shore of survival.

Synopsis

Genre: Adventure / Drama / Coming-of-Age

Format: Feature Film, 110–120 minutes

Rating: 16+

Based on: The autobiography by Konstantin Voskresenskiy

Tone: Warm, funny, occasionally heartbreaking – in the spirit of

Jojo Rabbit meets Cinema Paradiso, filtered through a distinctly Russian sensibility

In the summer of 1986, a nineteen-year-old Soviet soldier named Dmitriy Voskresenskiy is shot dead at a military outpost near the Chinese border. The government calls it hemorrhagic fever. His father Nikolay, who identifies the body in a Moscow morgue, counts five bullet wounds and says nothing. A death certificate is stamped. A life is erased. A boy named Kesha will grow up without knowing any of this.

One year earlier, in a cramped apartment in the Moscow suburb of Klimovsk, the family argues about what to name the baby. Three names go into a hat. God – or chance – picks Konstantin. The family calls him Kesha, like the cartoon parrot. The name will follow him everywhere, a joke that becomes an identity.

From the age of three, Kesha’s life is a chain of small disasters and improbable survivals. His mother remarries a man named Sergey – quiet, decent, never violent, but emotionally absent. At four, Kesha witnesses an apartment fire. One night he is simply forgotten at kindergarten, left alone until morning. At five, he is locked out of his apartment because both parents have passed out drunk. An old woman at a bus stop terrifies him so badly that he develops a stutter – a companion that will stay with him for life.

But Kesha is not a victim. He is an engine. At six, he talks his friend Roma into a bus ride to steal peas from a collective farm. At seven, he discovers the elevator game – riding on top of Soviet lift cabins in pitch darkness, inches from the shaft walls. At nine, in the darkest moment of his childhood, he drops a kitten from an eighth-floor balcony. The kitten survives, broken and mewing. Kesha never forgives himself. Twenty-four years later, when he holds a dying cat in a veterinary clinic, the echo returns – the same green eyes, the same unbearable guilt.

At ten, Kesha discovers capitalism. With friends Zhenya and Alexey, he collects bottles, steals scrap metal from military bases, builds a bench for elderly neighbours (who refuse to pay). He learns the first law of Russian business: always agree on the price beforehand.