Cinema between Scylla and Charybdis

Censorship in the Russian Federation is prohibited by the Constitution, but self-censorship in the current conditions is becoming an indispensable element for the survival of the media business. Against the backdrop of the adoption of the law on LGBT propaganda over the past month, services cut out entire scenes from TV shows and films, and sometimes deleted them entirely, despite the fact that the rights have been bought out and now it is not always easy to get: against the backdrop of sanctions, foreigners often do not agree to be shown in the Russian Federation new content and do not renew contracts for archival content.

For example, “Brokeback Mountain” and “Call Me By Your Name” disappeared from the ivi library, the VODovorOTT Telegram channel drew attention. Mentions about LGBT representatives were cut out from the Sex and the City series in Kinopoisk, for example, in the ninth episode of the first season. Amediateka removed Euphoria from the series for about two hours: sex scenes, same-sex kisses and dialogues about gender disappeared. The series “White Lotus” also got it: Wonderzine wrote that “Amediateka” cut out an intimate scene from the fifth episode of the second season, and also changed the dubbing, replacing the word “gay” with “man”.

This is how services try to protect themselves from legal risks: fines for legal entities under the law on LGBT propaganda can be up to 10 million rubles. One of the co-authors of the law, the head of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy Alexander Khinshtein, insisted on his Telegram channel that no one demanded that online movie theaters cut scenes from TV shows and replace the word “gay” in dubbing. But such clarifications are unlikely to reassure market participants: they rely on the wording of the law, and only judicial practice will determine the degree of breadth of their interpretations.

From a legal point of view, the safest would probably be the complete removal of all films and TV shows with LGBT references, but the problem is that it is difficult to find a modern foreign TV series without such references. Therefore, in order to maintain business, online cinemas will have to go between Scylla and Charybdis: on the one hand, to avoid fines, on the other hand, to take into account the risks of losing audience interest. But both those and other risks will only increase in the near future.

As libraries shrink due to renewal issues, users will increasingly turn to pirated services, and content regulation is likely to intensify. So, recently a member of the State Duma Committee on Culture, Sergei Solovyov, proposed discussing the possibility of removing scenes from films with the participation of actors recognized as foreign agents (among them, for example, TV presenter and actor Mikhail Shats, presenter Tatyana Lazareva, actor Artur Smolyaninov, known for his roles in The Ninth company” and “The Book of Masters”, Maxim Galkin and others): “This, of course, will be state control, one might say tougher – public censorship, but in the interests of society and the state.”