A Little Gray Wolf Will Come
original title: Dolazi mali sivi vuk
2025, 90 min., color, Russin-English-Italian-French
DOCUMENTARY CATEGORIES : Current Time / Politics, Social / Society / Human, Portraits
COUNTRIES: France, Croatia, Netherlands
PRODUCTION : BUDGET : -
CAST
Zhanna Agalakova, Giorgio Savona
CREW
Director : Screenplay : Zhanna Agalakova, Tatjana Božić, Giorgio SavonaCinematographer : Giorgio Savona
Producers : Magdalena Petrović, Tatjana Bozic, Raymond Van Der Kaaij, Giorgio Savona
COMMENTS
FESTIVALS: Liburnija FF 2025, Cinehill FF 2025, Sheffield DocFest (International First Feature Competition / World Premiere) 2025
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT: This film is my intimate personal story. I came from the Perestroika generation and used to believe in a world without walls and frontiers. In the 90s, when I started my journalistic carrier, Russia had a record number of media outlets per capita. Any topic, any problem was discussed in the press like never before. I thought my job was like that of first responders or ambulance workers, just as necessary and important. 30 years later, I ask myself: how did it happen that I quite imperceptibly turned into a propagandist?
Since Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, Russian opposition media were subjected to repression, many of them were soon closed, others have been labelled “foreign agents”, which made their work extremely difficult. Many journalists and political opponents have been imprisoned, driven into exile or killed. The Kremlin and his host became the unique news maker in Russia. Ordinary citizens and their problems have become invisible to state media.
I started making this film as a journey in the footsteps of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In 1994, the exiled author of “The Gulag Archipelago,” decided to travel across Russia to see what had become of it after the collapse of the USSR. He collected first-hand accounts from people he met.
I began this journey when the country was in its prime, judging from the media’s claims. The gap between the TV screen and reality was stunning, and I couldn’t stay the same knowing that I helped creating the lie. What begins as a personal journey becomes an intimate, layered exploration of ideology, family, and the cost of truth.
The historical events to come sped up the story line. The full scale invasion in the Ukraine seemed a logical consequence of the reality depicted in my film. The silence and inaction of the Russian majority was deafening, shocking.
The film is named after a line from a popular Russian lullaby. For centuries, Russian mothers have sung to their babies: hush, lie still, or a wolf will drag you into the forest. Has this little white lie and fear it caused become a part of the Russian mentality?
For me it is no longer possible to remain silent, waiting for a little gray wolf. And hence, this film.
SYNOPSIS
On the eve of the war in Ukraine, a Russian journalist from pro-Kremlin TV channel brings her rebellious and Westernised teenage daughter on a journey through Putin’s Russia.
A sincere and captivating personal story of a Russian journalist, a familiar face on Russian state television, going through a complex journey of self-discovery and transformation – both as a journalist and as a mother – set against the backdrop of Putin’s Russia.
At its heart, a burning question: How did I allow lies, hatred, and propaganda to become the norm?
Alice calls her mother’s work propaganda, but Zhanna believes that she is working for the good of her homeland. As a foreign correspondent for Russian TV she covers the major events in the Western countries from the Kremlin’s perspective and she wants to make Alice more Russian.
But the girl doesn’t care about her cultural identity. She is half Russian and half Italian. She goes to French school and the family currently lives in New York. Alice doesn’t consider any country as her homeland. It is something Zhanna can’t grasp. She believes everyone should have a land to love. So Zhanna decides to show Alice the biggest country in the world. Her Motherland.
Over four summers and one winter, mother and daughter travel across the length and breadth of Putin’s Russia. But as their journey unfolds, Zhanna grapples with her past, her secrets, and her identity as both a journalist and a mother—while the country edges closer to a war.
A Little Grey Wolf Will Come is a powerful tale of love, lies, and the loss of homeland.
PRESS
“Creative storytelling, masterful editing… It is a compelling exploration of family, identity, and courage”. – Sheffield DocFest
“This layered, pained, generous family diary film is structured, if not as a mea culpa for having served Putin’s propaganda machine too long, then certainly as an insight into the wrenching mix of motives she felt in the years beforehand.” – Nick Bradshaw, Documentary Magazine
16:28 Zhanna Agalakova about your debut “The Little Gray Wolf Will Come” – Khodorkovskiy Live
Following in the footsteps of Solzhenitsyn: Zhanna Agalakova to RFi