The shooting of the large-scale documentary and feature film Empresses by film company 1-2-3 Production has started.
The film is being created as part of a Rus historical projects series about events and personalities that made it possible to transform Ancient Rus into the great Russian Empire. The first project of the series was the documentary and feature reconstruction film Peter I. The Last Tsar and the First Emperor. It was released in 2022 and became the highest-grossing nonfiction film collecting 275 million rubles at the box office and thereby confirming the audience’s demand to learn about the history of the Russian state. Empresses is the second film of the Rus series, and also directed by Andrey Kravchuk (Admiral, Union of Salvation, Peter I. The Last Tsar and the First Emperor). The film is about the first empresses of the Russian Empire: Catherine I, Anna Ioannovna and the main character of the film, Elizabeth I, whose role will be played by Yulia Peresild.