Volga - Volga

Volga-Volga (Russian: Волга-Волга) is a Soviet film comedy directed by Grigori Aleksandrov, released on April 24, 1938. It centres on a group of amateur performers on their way to Moscow to perform in a talent contest called the Moscow Musical Olympiad. Most of the action takes place on a steamboat travelling on the Volga River. The lead roles were played by Alexandrov's wife, Lyubov Orlova, and Igor Ilyinsky. According to Orlova, the name of the film is taken from a popular Russian folk song, Stenka Razin, that Alexandrov sang while rowing with Charlie Chaplin in San Francisco Bay. Chaplin jokingly suggested the words as a title for a movie, but Alexandrov took it seriously and named his new film Volga-Volga. The feature was said to be Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin's favourite film. Nikita Khrushchev in his memoirs says that in the pre-World War II period Stalin laughed at him since he resembled a character from the film. In 2006, a colorization of the original black-and-white film began. The colorized version premiered on the Russian First Channel on February 14, 2010.