Movie-maker from London lays bare treasures of the Hermitage Museum...and its cats

 
Private collection: Margy Kinmonth and team in Palace Square (Picture: Foxtrot Films)

London film-maker Margy Kinmonth will tonight unveil her new behind-the-scenes look at the treasures — and cats — of one of the world’s greatest museums

She has been given unprecedented access to the Hermitage in St Petersburg for a movie marking its 250th anniversary.

The documentary maker, whose previous subjects have ranged from the fashion world to Prince Charles’s watercolours, spent weeks amid the collections in the Winter Palace.

They range from West European and Russian art masterpieces to treasures of ancient history to the private gemstone collection of Catherine the Great, who founded the museum in 1764.

Unprecedented access: Margy Kinmonth films in the Hermitage in St Petersburg (Picture: Foxtrot Films)

Hermitage Revealed — 250 Years In The Making is released in cinemas tomorrow. The Notting Hill-based director said she hoped it would enable people who had never visited Russia to understand how the museum reflects the nation’s turbulent history, from imperial glory through revolution to communist rule and today.

“I went through this secret doorway into the labyrinth of the workings of the museum. It was a great mass of Soviet paperwork mixed with marvellous pots and antiquities and rooms of flouncy curtains and dust mites,” she said.

The old mousers: one of the cats that live in the art museum’s basement (Picture: Foxtrot Films)

Her guide was Hermitage’s director Mikhail Piotrovsky, whose first steps were in the museum — his father was director before him. The oddest find were the cats in the basement.

World’s greatest museum: Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

“I discovered that under the Winter Palace there is a huge colony of cats who’ve been living alongside the heating pipes since it was built, except in the Second World War during the Siege of Leningrad when everybody was starving...”

Guests including Antony Gormley, Jay Jopling and National Gallery director Nicholas Penny are expected to attend the premiere tonight.

Kinmouth’s documentaries include last year’s Royal Paintbox — in which Prince Charles reveals artworks by the royal family, including his own — and The Secret Life Of Haute Couture.

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