A Little Gray Wolf Will Come is a personal documentary that follows a well-known Russian journalist from a pro-Kremlin channel, Zhanna Agalakova, as she takes her rebellious, Western-oriented daughter on a journey across Putin’s Russia on the eve of the aggression on Ukraine.

Zhanna Agalakova is directing, and also co-penned the script with Tatjana Božić and Giorgio Savona. Božić was also engaged on the film as a creative producer and artistic advisor, while Giorgio Savona created the cinematographer and acts as co-producer. The film’s producer is Magdalena Petrović (LEWA Productions), with co-producer Raymond van der Kaaij, and production companies Revolver Amsterdam from the Netherlands and Giorgio Savona Productions from France. The film was edited by Alex Goekjian, Zhanna Agalakova and Katarina Türler, while the music score is composed by Marijn Slager.

“The film is named after a line from a famous Russian lullaby. For centuries, Russian mothers sang to their children: ‘Sleep, be still, or the wolf will come and take you to the forest.’ This is my intimate personal story. I belong to the Perestroika generation – I grew up believing in a world without walls and borders. I have been working as a journalist for thirty years. And now I am wondering – when did I stop asking questions and start serving the system? How did I, almost imperceptibly, become a cog in the propaganda machine?

The film began as a journey following in the footsteps of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who travelled across Russia in 1994 to see what remained after the collapse of the USSR. My journey started as the state media celebrated the country’s renaissance. But what I saw was something starkly different. The gap between the television image and real life was devastating. I realised that I had participated in the creation of that lie. The full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in 2022 came as the finale of a long process I had witnessed while we were filming. The silence of the Russian majority was deafening. But I can no longer stay silent and wait for the little grey wolf to come. And that’s why we made this film”, said the director.

The film is co-financed by the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, the Netherlands Film Fund and the Democracy and Media Foundation from the Netherlands.

A Little Gray Wolf world premiere is scheduled for 21 June, as part of the International First Feature Competition programme.

The Sheffield International Documentary Festival annually receives more than 25,000 visitors and 3,500 film industry professionals, making it the leading place for documentary form in the world.

Cover photographs: scenes from the documentary A Little Gray Wolf Will Come