Engineering Red

Engineering Red
Directed by	Andrey Yi, Armen Petrosyan
Written by	Andrey Yi
Based on	The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Produced by	Roman Krishtul
Starring	Anna Semkina
Production company	Sfera
Release date	1993 (1993)
Running time	75 minutes
Country	Russia
Language	Russian

Engineering Red (Russian: Конструктор красного цвета) is a 1993 Russian surrealist part-documentary/part-narrative film by Andrey Yi and animator Armen Petrosyan.

The script is based on Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain (1924) and idea of creating artificial people in the Soviet Union (in the 1940-1950s).

Plot

The film is divided into three chapters and has two storylines – documentary and fiction.

The fictional part of the film consists of psychedelic scenes: a red room, a girl in red silk, kaleidoscopic images. A female voice-over reads an excerpt from The Magic Mountain, in which the thoughts of a deceased soldier are heard (his consciousness is still in a dead body) sounding his reflections on Christ, the Apostles and the Bible. The soldier's body then falls prey to necrophilic children.

The documentary part tells about medicine, like pig heart transplant, cadaveric blood transfusion, story of conjoined twins etc.

History of creation

The idea for the film was crazy. But that was exactly what had to be done in those years. And I achieved my goal: two or three people really vomited while watching. This effect was worth it: the film was shown at the Moscow festival along with the films of world-class masters.

— Andrey Yi. Film director,