Once you spend your days doing what you love, you are able to have energy for family and life outside of work, Alexander Boguslavsky said.

Anyone can make a film. If you choose subjects you care about, the artistic product will follow, said film student Alexander Boguslavsky.

Boguslavsky will share his artistic gifts at the Milwaukee International Film Festival on Oct. 30, with his short film “My Little Philosopher.” In the film, he walks through the woods with his 5-year-old daughter as she answers his questions and gives observations. She talks about her dreams and holds a leaf up to observe its beauty.

Boguslavsky is grateful for his decision to be a filmmaker. After a year of studying computer science as an undergraduate, he switched to film. He is now a graduate student, teaching and working on his thesis at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee.

He came to Milwaukee 16 years ago from Minsk, Russia, a city similar in size to Milwaukee.

He said filmmaking is the only thing that makes sense to him at the moment. “If it doesn’t bring me pleasure, I just can’t dedicate myself to it,” he said, adding that passion is essential for everyone. “Everybody has some kind of talent. You just have to admit to yourself that you are wasting your time doing something you shouldn’t.”

Once you spend your days doing what you love, you are able to have energy for family and life outside of work, he said.

This is what he teaches his students, to not lose time doubting their path as artists.

He also encourages reading, which engages the imagination and inspires films. He said the imagery and atmosphere imagined when reading is what a filmmaker can translate into what we see on the screen.

One of his favorite books is “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” by James Joyce. He is intrigued by the way the character's unrelated memories are presented. He said it is like paging through someone’s photo album where the pictures are not in chronological order.

“This literature is for an advanced reader,” he said. “It is like a spiritual labor to read his books. They are very challenging. It engages every ability you have.”

The technique of “My Little Philosopher” may be similar to Joyce’s style because Boguslavsky had to take everything his daughter said during their one day of filming and somehow thread it all together.

It was hard for him to control the conversation, so he just let her talk about what she wanted. He said the main challenge of the poetic documentary genre is to find the thread and preserve it.

His daughter, Yulia, turned 6 this September. Some shots feature her big eyes and curly hair. In one, she is dipping a leaf into the water while she speaks in Russian.

Her crafts are displayed in Boguslavsky’s kitchen and living room and multicolored alphabet magnets are arranged on the fridge.

Boguslavsky said Yulia acts natural in front of the camera.

“I think she doesn’t understand how serious it is, making film,” he said. “She never pretends to be anyone else. She never freezes. She is very natural. That is why she is so interesting to watch.”

Boguslavsky’s thesis film is about friend of his who is shooting a first feature film. It is not a “making of,” however.

“It is about living in a dream and living in a dream world,” he said. His friend makes sacrifices and gives up things such as having a family so he can dedicate himself to his filmmaking.

“So it is not about just him, this friend of mine,” Boguslavsky said. “It is about every artist.”

Boguslavsky’s undergraduate film “Blue Lamp,” an autobiographical film about a child’s connection with the mother, won a $1,000 Kodak Film Stock Grant for Best Experimental Short at the Wisconsin Film Festival in 2002. That year, it was also the winner of the UWM Student Film and Video Festival.

He said that winning makes him neither selfish nor ungrateful, but he concentrates instead on what is important to him — making films that are truthful and sincere.

“The last thing you should do when you make something is think about future rewards,” he said. “When you write to yourself in a diary, you don’t lie on the paper, right? That is how you make film. You have to be as sincere as possible to yourself. The last thing you worry about is how people are going to react.”

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