Kantemir Balagov's main source of inspiration was Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich's book "War Does Not Have a Woman's Face", written in 1983.
Official submission of Russia for the 'Best International Feature Film' category of the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020.
The streetcars in Beanpole are authentic. They were a loan from the Museum of Electrical Transport in St. Petersburg. One of the challenges the crew encountered was constructing a special step outside of the streetcar - usually used by people without tickets who rode, just hanging on for dear life. Given it wasn't possible to do in a museum exhibit, production had to construct a special contraption that wouldn't damage the original step, but at the same time could support the weight of a dozen people.
In the young women's apartment, the precise texture of an authentic, historical St. Petersburg's flat of that time was recreated. Every wall was covered by up to five layers of different wallpaper: from pre-revolutionary wallpaper to the pages of biological atlases depicting exotic birds. Some of the materials used were actual historical wallpaper and not modern recreations. For later periods they used Soviet newspapers as wallpaper. When the film's historical consultant visited the set, he was impressed that he couldn't spot the difference between recreations and authentic materials.
Though the film is set in a very realistic version of 1945 Leningrad -- one steeped in rust and green, suggesting a spiritual rot infecting the city itself -- no Communist symbols are seen in the production design, a conscious choice on Kantemir Balagov's part. "I wanted the story to feel timeless, because cinema for me is a tool of immortality, and [someone like Joseph Stalin] doesn't deserve this immortality."