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Russian filmmakers had done their part to identify new foreign cultural relations and integrate our country into a global art world. Vladimir Putin dug up the axe and buried all those efforts of our national talents.
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On February 24, President Putin declared war on Ukraine on anything short of name. But war has raged in Russia for years. Culture, cinema more precisely, has a battlefield. We will now have to protect the right to communicate about the problems we have. they have been arguing for decades.
The so-called “gay propaganda” law, the notorious anti-gay law, has prevented LGBTQ filmmakers like me from representing my network without degrading euphemisms. It is impossible, for example, in my country to film and broadcast a series about a 15-year-old transgender girl. I’ve noticed that those stories slip into presentation sessions, only to be killed before they get the green light.
It came out of doubt that Absence, my high-concept horror feature film script, for example, would get government support. In the story, the main character turns out to be homosexual and is in the closet, and one of the main disorders is that he is revealed. Now there is a statement to extend this law to a blanket ban on all data on LGBTQ people, not only for young people but for all Russians.
Patriarchal and imperial perspectives on artistic professions have kept women out of the ranks of filmmakers and removed ethnic diversity from our screens. Two men wrote and directed a series called “profeminist” on one of our local broadcast services, a series that really ridiculed the feminist movement. Actors of Slavic appearance get many more tasks than those who, according to the judgment of the Russian authorities, seem “others” and are therefore perceived as possible internal enemies.
Despite all those ingrained and inflexible prejudices, open-minded Russian writers and administrators have achieved, for more than five to seven years 7, some amazing things. We were looking to build a tower of Babel and we did. Victories at foreign film festivals have made Andrei Tarkovsky Andrei Zvyagintsev well-known names in Russian artistic cinema. There have also been publicity hits: Major Grom: The Plague Doctor and Silver Skates, two Russian Netflix originals, topped the charts in dozens of countries. Russian TV series sold on platforms from Amazon Prime to AppleTV.
These industry milestones have helped pave the way for national skill to become global. In the world of European art and production, there is a well-established career path: you write and shoot an independent film in your own country, in your first in English, and then, if you are lucky, studio director. It is the style of the careers of the Norwegian director André Øvredal (Troll Hunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe), the Swedish Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), or the French filmmaker Julia Ducournau, who, in addition to her successes at the French festivals Raw and Titane, has directed episodes of the AppleTV Servant series.
Russian talents have also made this leap abroad. HBO has hired Kantemir Balagov, director of Closeness and Beanpole, to direct the pilot of its series Last of Us. Ilya Naishuller directed the Universal Pictures Person action mystery with Bob Odenkirk.
But domestic successes and foreign victories by Russian filmmakers are now banned. Russia is thought to be an aggressor country. Their leaders painted their own culture in bloody tones. Netflix suspended production of all its Russian originals. towards independent Russian talent, but they are incredibly cautious. The fate of many films on the foreign festival circuit remains uncertain. I don’t know, for example, if my short film Dead End will be broadcast or can be broadcast on the foreign circuit. My long-term career path as a director is unclear.
Like me, many filmmakers have fled Russia. We are scattered in neighboring countries, unable to evacuate or make explicit our dark anguish. It is no longer conceivable to turn a blind eye or have illusions about what is happening inside the country. Our career plans are constantly evolving. Many now seem little more than chimeras. The Tower of Babel fell. Russia’s talents have been lost.
It is appalling to be uprooted through one’s own government and not be able to express oneself through culture. Will Russian prowess be able to fend for itself abroad?Unknown. In a column for Vanity Fair, writer/director Mikhail Idov (Leto, Deutschland 89) wrote that he would no longer write in Russian as long as Vladimir Putin remained in power. This would possibly be the only way out for Russian filmmakers: to become non-Russian administrators and screenwriters. Promising will have to make their way in the English-speaking world, to try to create truly perfect works that bring cultural value to other countries.
Even if it works, it will leave Russian culture as a remote and abandoned territory, a hard-to-understand empire that Putin has built. What good is a land invasion of some other country if it turns your own house into a cultural desert?
Dima Barch is a Russian journalist and cultural and social filmmaker. He left Russia and now lives abroad.
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