Les cahiers retrouvés de Nina Vyroubova

Once upon a time there was a little girl named Nina. Born in Crimea, she and her mother left the country for France. She was only three when they settled down in the town of Meudon. There, Nina's mum became a dance teacher and the little girl soon became a little figure - dancer. After taking classes with famous names of Russian dance mistresses (Trefilova, Preobrajenja, Egorova) she became a dancer in a troupe. In 1946 a good fairy named Roland Petit chose her to be the star of Henri Sauguet's ballet « Les Forains ». Three years later the miracle continued for the little refugee from Meudon, the immense choreographer Serge Lifar called upon her to replace the star dancer of the Paris Opera, Yvette Chauviré. She was now a prima ballerina. Combining her high technical level with a taste for lyricism, mysticism and expressiveness, she furthered her career in the troupe of the Marquis de Cuevas. Until in the mid-1960s, she considered time was ripe for retirement - and for transmission. Dominique Delouche's camera shows her in 1995, at the age of 74, at the Opéra de Paris transmitting to young dancers all the subtleties of her art, particularly the choreographies she inspired in Lifar and other great masters. We also follow her on a trip to her native Russia, to Saint Petersburg, where she is honored at the Russian Ballet Academy, and to Gurzuf, the Crimean town on the Black Sea where she was born. Throughout the film, photos, archive footage and film extracts (including two by Delouche) are interspersed between the sequences devoted to the present, movingly linking a particularly successful life story, a winning mixture of exceptional personal talent and favorable conditions. —Guy Bellinger