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To Live (And Almost Die) In Russia . . . But All’s Well That Ends Well

Over the years animators have asked me “aren’t you afraid to go to Russia?” and “what would happen if you got seriously ill there?”  The answer to the first question has always been no, attending KROK is very safe and I have never been afraid in Russia. Now I can answer the second question with firsthand knowledge.  The KROK staff will make sure that you get excellent medical treatment if you should get seriously ill.

22nd KROK INTERNATIONAL ANIMATED FILM FESTIVAL - Moscow to St. Petersburg, September 20 -28, 2015

There are many festivals that I really enjoy attending but KROK holds a special place in my heart and I look forward to it every year.  The festival takes place on a cruise ship with about 200 animators from around the world.  This year the boat sailed from Moscow to St. Petersburg via northern waterways.

Over the years animators have asked me “aren’t you afraid to go to Russia?” and “what would happen if you got seriously ill there?”  The answer to the first question has always been no, attending KROK is very safe and I have never been afraid in Russia. Now I can answer the second question with firsthand knowledge.  The KROK staff will make sure that you get excellent medical treatment if you should get seriously ill.

I didn’t feel very well on my last day in Belarus but just thought that I was a bit tired.  I was looking forward to my two days in Moscow before it was time to board the KROK boat.  I was sharing an AirB&B apartment with a South African animator, a friend of a friend, that I didn’t know, who was also sailing on the KROK boat. I was looking forward to having time to visit the Pushkin Museum in Moscow which, with their extensive collection of French Impressionists paintings, is one of my favorite places in the city.

During the next two days I began to feel very weak - food didn’t taste good, I wasn’t hungry, and I didn’t even want any wine.   That was really beginning to worry me.  I realized that I hadn’t been eating much for several months and had lost a lot of weight.  When I started passing out when I got up, my apartment mate suggested that I go to the hospital, but I didn’t want to because I was worried about ending up in a strange hospital where no one spoke English.  I hoped once I got on the KROK boat I would feel better and knew that I would be with friends who would help me if I needed it.

I was very relieved that my Belarus friend Mikhail Tumelya had offered to pick us up in a taxi to go to the KROK boat because I knew that I was in no shape to navigate the Moscow subway system. 

The KROK staff knows me very well and I think that when I walked into the office to say hello they could tell something was wrong with me.  They sat me down, gave me food, which I couldn’t eat, and a cup of black tea that tasted so good.  By this time I was feeling very weak, my legs and body felt like tooth picks while my head felt like a large rock that was too heavy for my body to hold up.

Preparing to get on to the KROK ship

I made it to the opening night ceremony that evening held in the House of Cinema, but while I was waiting for the cinema doors to open I began to feel faint again.  Luckily with a little help from my friends I managed to get to a chair before I hit the ground. I did get to watch the first competition screening and I am glad that I got see Owl Me Tender. It is an Exquisite Corpse created by twenty animators from ten different countries.  The animators who created segments reads like a who’s-who in animation: Alexey Budovsky, Alexey Alexeev, Monique Renault, and Ivan Maximov to name just a few.  The film is a music video for Tender Owls recorded by the French band Les Pires in 1994.  The song became popular in the animation community after the 2005 KROK when it was played over and over.

For the past few years I have watched Italian film maker Julia Gromskaya’s animation develop and mature and I was very impressed by her latest film Winter & Lizard.  The beautifully hand drawn film is the tale of a woman who returns to the house that she grew up in.  Memories of her family home send her on an imaginary flight through her past.

Sadly I don’t remember much more about opening night or the party on our ship, the Konstantin Simonov, named after the renowned Soviet poet and author.

The next day I went to the first screening but don’t remember what I saw.  I also made it to a couple of meals but couldn’t eat much since ice cream and tea were the only things that tasted good.

By the third day of KROK I couldn’t get out of bed.  When the KROK staff noticed that I was not appearing at screenings or meals they came to check on me in my cabin and immediately realized that something was terribly wrong. They sent for the ship’s doctor.

The doctor determined that my blood pressure was terribly low, almost flat lining, and she immediately put me on an IV.  The doctor checked on me regularly as did Yuliana Chyzhova, one of the festival translators.  Yuliana also brought me thermoses of hot black tea because I was very cold and tea was the only thing that I could keep down.

The next day the doctor decided that I needed to be in a hospital because my blood pressure was not going up. The ship was not due to dock for 24 hours so she made me as comfortable as possible with more IV’s until I could be taken off the boat.

When we docked at the small village of Goritsy I was carried down the three flights of stairs from my cabin in a chair by four strong friends.  Festival Director Irina Kaplichnaya along with festival staff and friends were on the dock to say goodbye and to wish me a speedy recovery.  I was put on a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance for the trip to the small hospital.

  At the hospital I remember two women who spoke no English.  Everything began to be very surreal as I slipped in and out of consciousness.  They put a shunt in my arm for the IV that was to be my constant companion for the next week. They also gave me a cup of tea, but there wasn’t much more that they could do for me there.  

I have no idea how long I lay on the cot in the room.  The only thing that I remember is watching a fly trying to get out through a closed window.  After what seemed like an eternity, but was actually seven or eight hours, an English speaking doctor arrived and told me that as soon as he had me stabilized enough to travel I would be taken to St. Petersburg by ambulance.  It was a seven hour drive from Goritsy to St. Petersburg and the first hour over a rutty dirt road before we hit the highway.  I don’t remember much about the drive except that the doctor was very kind, made me as comfortable as possible, and had great taste in music.

The next thing I remember was waking up in a lovely large room with sun streaming through the big windows, clean sheet, and all sorts of suction cups with wires stuck to my chest.  The IV was back in the shunt in my wrist.  It turns out that I was in the Euromed Clinic which treats most of the members of diplomatic staffs and foreign guests in Russia.  My doctors and nurses as well as the administrative staff spoke fluent English.    The clinic offers very personal service, I had only two nurses throughout my week long stay as well as my own medical team who went over every inch of me with MRI’s and numerous tests.  At every step of the way the medical team explained exactly what they were doing and why.  The meals were also excellent and I began to slowly get my appetite back. It turns out that my body was not retaining potassium which had caused my gradual loss of appetite and the extremely low blood pressure.

I received excellent, first class medical treatment at the Euromed clinic and will never be able to thank the KROK staff enough for making sure that I was taken to the clinic in St. Petersburg.  They truly saved my life.  They also called every day to check on my condition and sent me cheery get well e-mails which definitely brightened me up.  After six days the doctors finally got my blood pressure and potassium levels stabilized enough that I could fly home if I agreed to see my doctor as soon as I got home.  Euromed also gave me an hour by hour log of my stay at the clinic, what medication and treatments I had been given, and the results of the MRI and other tests for me to take to my doctor.

Nik had not known anything about any of this until the KROK staff e-mailed him when they put me in the hospital in Goritsy.  He assumed that I was on the KROK boat and wasn’t too concerned about not hearing from me because he knows that there is limited e-mail on the boat and I am usually having too much fun to be sending e-mails anyway.

The flight home was pretty difficult, especially with an all-night lay over in Riga, Latvia’s airport. I was very glad to see Nik when he met me at Brussels Airport with a car since I was still very weak and the train takes an hour and a half from the airport to Gent.

After my doctor in Gent read the Euromed report and took my blood pressure, she insisted I go to the emergency room immediately!!! I was beginning to feel like a pin cushion with all of the blood that had been taken out of me in the last week but after more tests I was wheeled up to intensive care where I was once again hooked up to more electric monitors.  Intensive care was a very interesting experience.  Everyone else there was either a heart attack or accident victim who was semi-conscious and had even more tubes in them then I did. 

I had never thought about the fact that there are no meals served in intensive care because everyone there was tube fed or on very limited diets except me.  Nik brought me three delicious home cooked meals every day and all of the nurses were most envious of the wonderful smells coming from my cubical.  After all of the weight I had lost it was so nice to have my appetite back and to be eating good food along with my tea.  All of the nurses in intensive care were exceptionally nice to me even when they had to wake me up in the middle of the night to take more blood samples.

Unfortunately I was beginning to feel much better and was anxious to come home, but the doctors still hadn’t found out what was causing my body not to retain potassium.  Despite their giving me endless IV bags of  potassium my level stayed low and they were not going to let me go home until the problem was solved.

I have always been a big black tea drinker, starting my day with a large pot of tea and then having a cup or three in the afternoon.  On my third day in intensive care the head doctor asked me a strange question, did I drank tea and if so how much and what kind. When he told me that my inability to retain potassium might very well be due to black tea I laughed and couldn’t believe it.

The next day Nik brought a sample of the black tea I get from my favorite tea shop for the doctor to analyze.  After more tests it turned out that my low blood pressure and inability to retain potassium was due to drinking black tea.  My doctor explained that it is a very rare condition but for the few people who have the problem it  can be fatal since it causes fainting, weight loss, extremely low blood pressure, and loss of potassium.

I had never thought about the importance of potassium in my body.  I learned that potassium is necessary to keep the muscles in our bodies strong and functioning properly especially the heart muscles, which was why the doctors had hooked me up to a heart monitor.  All of the doctors I saw at both hospitals were amazed that my heart had not been damaged.

I still can’t quite believe that I was so near to death and all because of tea.  I am happy to say that I am strong and healthy again but I am still missing my black tea in the morning.  The problem has nothing to do with caffeine and I can still drink herbal teas but I have to be very careful because many herbal teas have a base of black or green tea which I must avoid.

Once again I thank everyone at KROK for the wonderful medical care I receive and apologize to the people that I scared when I kept fainting.  I am already looking forward to KROK 2016 when I promise to be my usual hale and hearty self.  A note, especially for my American readers, my entire extensive hospital stays in both Russia and Belgium were totally covered by my Belgian medical insurance, for which I pay 75 Euros a year.

 I am also very sorry that I was still in the hospital when Balkanima was held in Belgrade, Serbia because I had been invited to be a juror and was really looking forward to participating in the festival.  I was well enough to go to Warsaw, Poland a few weeks later where I served on the jury of the International Puppet Animation Festival which I will write about next.

  KROK Prize Winning Films

 Category 1 (Films up to 5 Minutes)

       Jury Diploma for design, intrigue, and suprising climax – Prey, Boyoung Kim, Republic of Korea

       Jury Dipolma for humor in playing with time – A Single Life, Job, Joris, & Marieke, The Netherlands

       Category Winner – Baths, Tomek Ducki, Poland

Category 2 (Films from 5 to 10 minutes)

         Jury Diploma for being precise – Tick Tack, Ulo Pikkov, Estonia

         Jury Diploma for poetic visuals – Absent Minded, Roberto Catani, Italy

         Category Winner – Nuggets, Andreas Hykade, Germany

Category 3 (Films from 10 to 50 minutes)

         Jury Diploma for rhythm, poetry, and irony – My Own Personal Moose, Leonid Shmelkov, Russia

         Jury Diploma for expressive style and passion for cinema – Man Meets Woman, Dmitry Geller, Russia

         Category Winner – Wolf, Ekaterina Sokolova, Russia

Category 4 (Films for Children)

         Jury Diploma for musicality – Pik-Pik-Pik, Dmitry Vysotskly, Russia

         Jury Diploma for an original and funny story – One, Two, Three, Yulia Aronova, France/Switzerland

         Category Winner ($5,000.00 cash prize) – Counting Sheep, Frits Standaert, France/Belgium

Category 5 (Applied and commissioned animation)

         Jury Diploma for humor – The Ant and the Anteater, Alexey Alexeev, Russia

         Jury Diploma for making education cool – The Tale of Bygone Years – Lida, Maria Matusevich, Belarus

         Category Winner – Piglet Babysitter, Natalia Berezovaya, Russia

Category 6 (Off Limits)

         Jury Diploma for the correct use of fruit in a film – Madam and Deva, Natalia Mirzoyan, Russia

         Jury Diploma for odd imagination – House of the Unconsciousness, Priit Tender, Estonia

           Category Winner – Storm Hits Jacket, Paul Cabon, France

Special Jury Prize – For being loyal to family values – Pilots on the Way Home, Olga & Priit Parn, Estonia

Special Jury Prize – For attention to the smallest details – Johnny Express, Woo Kyungmin, Republic of Korea

Best Debut Film ($2,000.00 cash prize) – Yul and the Snake, Gabriel Harel, France

Alexander Tatarsky Prize, The Plasticine Statue ($5,000.00 cash prize) – We Can’t Live Without Cosmos, Konstantin   Bronzit, Russia

Grand Prix ($7,000.00 cash prise) – Brutus, Svetlana Filippova, Russia

Special Prize of the Organizing Committee of KROK (Owl Statuette by Oleg Pedan) – Owl Me Tender, Alexey Budovsky, Yulia Ruditskaya, Svetlana Andrianova, Yulia Thai, Ramil Usmanov, Ivan Maximov, Serge Merinov, Gayane Matevosyan, Andrey Bakhurin, Natalia Mirzoyan, Naira Muradyan, Sasha Svirsky, Monique Renault, Natalia Berezovaya, Natalia Skriabina, Marina Rosst, Rim Sharafutdinov, Mikhail Tumelya, Andrei Zolotukhin, and Alexey Alexeey, various countries

Audience Award – Sexy Laundry, Izabela Plucińska, Germany/Poland/Canada

JURY:

Dima Malanitchev – USA7Russia

Dina Goder – Russia/Isreal

Maya Yonesho – Japan/Germany

Reeves Lehmann – USA

Oleg Pedan - Ukraine