
Big thanks here go out to regular Twitch reader Vladimir for this one.
I am a big, big fan of Philip Yankovsky's Sword Bearer, an arty super power film that to my mind still stands as the best of the recent wave of Russian genre film. Yankovsky is one of the brightest lights of current Russian film, a smart writer who shorts gorgeous film and we've been anxiously tracking his upcoming Rock Head for months now, ever since the day we first heard of it. A psychological crime thriller that stars real life heavyweight boxer Nikolay Valuev - a truly fearsome looking man - in the lead role as an amnesiac boxer reconstructing his own past while on a quest for revenge.
We've run a series of impressive production stills and some behind the scenes footage in the past and Vladimir has just pointed the way to the brand new, just released first trailer for the picture. Though it appears that this was cut with footage before it was fully through the post production process - the sound is a dead giveaway and the color correction seems slightly off - it is still looking very, very good. Check it out below the break in the Twitch Player.

looks really awful to me.
Stills look MUCH better. This trailer was cut with stuff that hasn't been properly color corrected. It seems to be a really common practice with Russian films to cut trailers with unfinished footage, which I'll never understand. Same thing happened with Yankovsky's previous film ... there was some really raw footage in the trailers but the finished film (The Sword Bearer) is absolutely gorgeous on screen, as his his previous film, State Councilor. The guy's got the goods.