Silver Skates (2020) on Netflix
TV-MA20202h 16mAdventureDramaFamily
In 1899 St. Petersburg, courier Matvey races the frozen canals on silver skates. With his father ill, he joins a gang of pickpockets. Alisa, a minister's daughter, wants to study chemistry.
- Netflix2.8/5
- IMDb7.1/109,131 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes40%
Trailer
Plot summary
At the close of 1899, the frozen rivers and canals of St. Petersburg serve as roads, crowded with skaters and markets on the ice. Matvey Polyakov, eighteen, delivers for a patisserie on the silver-plated skates his father, a lamplighter, left him. When a closed street costs him the job and his father is found to have late-stage consumption, with the one clinic that might cure him in Baden-Baden, Matvey turns to the pickpockets he met on the canals. Their leader, Alex, admires his speed and begins training him. Alisa Vyazemskaya, the daughter of the tsarist minister Nikolai Vyazemsky, keeps her study of chemistry hidden from her father, who believes university would only make her a free-thinker and a rebel, while her stepmother Severina urges that she be married, and Prince Arkady Trubetskoy, a captain of the guard, seeks her hand.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Silver Skates (2020)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The Silver Skates was called "scandalous" by journalists after Russia's natural-resources watchdog, Rosprirodnadzor, opened a case over the production covering the ice of the Moyka River, Kryukov Canal and Griboyedov Canal with blue wooden slabs.
- Vast amounts of scenery for the film were taken from a 10,000-square-metre warehouse and installed on special structures on Saint Petersburg's Great Neva by emergency response personnel.
- Most of the film was shot on Saint Petersburg's frozen rivers and canals, the largest collection of such footage, and when spring 2019 arrived the crew built a large-scale frozen Moyka River set inside a pavilion for the ice action scenes.
- About 200 visual-effects specialists worked on the film; the CGF studio scanned the centre of Saint Petersburg with a special camera so real architectural landmarks could be built into chroma-key scenes shot in the pavilion.
- Period skates, carriages, sleighs and cars were custom made for the film, and the jewelry worn in it was rented from Garrard & Co and kept under guard.
- Fedor Fedotov, who played the courier Matvey, had played ice hockey since he was three but spent three months learning a figure-skating style for the role, and performed almost all the film's stunts himself.
- The Silver Skates was the first Russian film to be released on Netflix in the Netflix Originals category.
