“Everyone is silent, and silence is the best ally of violence” – Weekend – Kommersant

The “Sisters” by Ivan Petukhov are being released. His character Anya (Irina Starshenbaum) lives with her husband Andrei (Nikita Efremov) in a typical new building in one of the provincial Russian cities. Outwardly, this is an ordinary happy family, but for the heroine she literally turned into a prison from which there is no way out: her husband locks her in an apartment after an escape attempt and controls her every action. Ivan Petukhov spoke about why post-horror films are not filmed in Russia and whether men have the right to talk about domestic violence Konstantin Shavlovsky.

Sisters is the first Russian post-horror film. Do you feel like a pioneer of the genre?

Probably yes, and this feeling grew out of my communication with the producers, whom I proposed to launch with the Sisters. It turned out that almost no one understood what it was. They asked me in all seriousness: horror is like A Nightmare on Elm Street, right? I patiently said that horror is no longer the same as it was in the eighties, that post-horror is called the author’s horror films, where serious statements are placed in the frame of genre cinema, I talked about Jordan Peele, Ari Astaire, Robert Eggers. True, that was about three years ago, when I was just starting to work on the film – in fact, the first year passed in such conversations.

Maybe the fact is that in Soviet cinema there is no tradition of horror films, except for “Viya”? What kind of post-horror is there when we have just had horrors?

Authorial horror is not very popular in Russia, because there are no authors in Russian horror cinema. Everything that is being filmed is a deeply produced film, built on very reliable moves, copied from Western examples of the genre, and not the highest ones at that. They are designed for a niche audience, oddly enough, not only Russian, but also international. And films like The Bride find their audience outside of Russia, because they use universal horror tropes, adding some local flavor to the plot. It’s all quite cheap to produce and recognizable. And the author’s experiments in Russian horror, which can be counted on the fingers, as a rule, are much less successful at the box office, from Pavel Ruminov’s Dead Daughters to the recent Side Effect by Lesha Kazakov. Seriously, we can only talk about the local successes of the Yakut horror. The recent “Ichchi” by Costas Marsaan, for example, is quite an author’s horror with a very bright and peculiar texture, with its own face.

Post-horror is very often also slowburners, where the action almost does not develop, gets stuck in everyday dialogues and agonizingly waiting for the denouement. How slow have you allowed yourself to be?

Of course, they told me: listen, your first mystical element appears only at the 35th minute, maybe we can somehow cheer up the first part a little? But I managed to defend it, because it was important to set the world, relationships, characters, make the viewer fall in love with the heroine and only then move on to the mystical part. In The Sisters, the whole dramaturgy is based on the clash of the realistic and the mystical, and in general, the Sisters need a mystical element only in order to compare it with the real horror that happens to women suffering from abuse. To plunge people immediately into mystical horror would mean to knock down the realism of this story.

And what did you have at first – the ambition to make the first Russian post-horror film or the desire to talk about domestic violence?

Of course, I started from the topic and looked for the language in which I can talk about it. Pretty soon I realized that it was going to be a horror movie. But in the first draft of the script, I filled the story with all kinds of horror clichés, so it was such a strange combination of social drama and classic mystical horror with screamers and even monsters. And it became clear that all of them rather lead away from the topic than bring it closer. Then I started to get rid of them, and at some point in the film there was not a single screamer left. That’s when I realized that the balance had been found and it was possible to shoot.

Where did the story of the self-immolated nuns come from and why does the film start with charcoal animation? Is this a declaration of love for David Lynch’s “Fire”?

It’s an amazing series of coincidences. I first came up with the legend about the sisters, and then I read everything about the mass self-immolation of the Old Believers in Rus’. And I, to my shame, watched “Fire” by Lynch after the animation part was invented by us. Coal in this story is symbolic, like the same black snow that really falls periodically in the industrial regions of the country and the world. But, needless to say, Lynch is generally a good reference in our case. He figured out how to show the terrible without visible horror long before it became fashionable.

Since the word “reference” has already appeared, I’ll ask about who you were guided by and what, maybe, you watched with the group?

We had a lot of references, from the obvious Astaire and Eggers to Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road or the recent remake “Scenes from Married Life” Bergman. The operator Maxim Smirnov had his own main reference, he said that we should focus on “mother!” Aronofsky. But if you choose any one film that served as the main source of inspiration for me, it is Andrzej Zulawski’s Possessed with Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill, where all the tension is created by very simple, everyday means. And this is what we tried to achieve: to show that the familiar world is fraught with something terrible, and this horror is not some sisters who came from another world. She lives in what we can hold in our hands every day – like a kitchen knife, which, by the way, is the most popular murder weapon in Russia.

Why did you need a genre wrapper, why not talk about the problem of violence directly – as, for example, Askar Uzabaev in a recent “Happiness” ?

Genre choice is just my directorial choice. Because everything I read about it reminded me a lot of a horror movie. What’s more, nothing we imagined in The Sisters can be compared in terms of horror to any first-person story of a woman who suffered from domestic violence. I would like to have ten or a hundred such films – and that among them there were dramas, and tragedies, and procedurals.

How deep have you delved into the problem of domestic violence in Russia?

Judging by the numbers that are given in the studies, we all at some point met with both the aggressors and the victims. I cannot say that I have any special personal experience behind the choice of this topic. But of course, I read a lot of personal stories, and when I started to dive into it, such stories began to surface in my inner circle. They are usually told in a lower voice, because in our society it is still considered that it is shameful to talk about violence, especially about psychological violence committed against you. That is why everyone is silent, and silence is the best ally of violence.

Aren’t you afraid that you will be accused of the fact that, they say, men again appropriate the votes of the victims?

It seems to me that one does not need to be a woman to understand, at least to some extent, what a woman experiences in a situation of domestic violence. You just need to be human, that’s enough. And if, when discussing such global problems, we begin to divide into those who have and do not have the right to talk about them, then these problems will be solved even more slowly. The acceptability of violence in Russia is the abyss that we are trying to fight against, highlighting it with this little flashlight of ours, and, of course, it is incommensurably greater than what we can cover with one film. And everything that draws attention to this topic, as practice shows, can help someone. Therefore, I am not afraid of criticism – neither from the left nor from the right. Let it fly.

How did Nikita Efremov and Irina Starshenbaum appear in the film?

Ira and I made the short film “No” together, and a year later we started discussing “Sisters”. At some point, it became quite obvious that this was her role, and she approached it very deeply, read many books and articles, analyzed every line in the script. She had such hyper-responsibility, because, it turns out, she became the face of all women suffering from domestic violence. And she couldn’t afford to lie anywhere. And Nikita appeared in the project later, we were looking for an actor for this role for a long time.

Were there any failures?

Yes, but not because of the topic, but because of employment. In general, we have very few men in the category of 30-40 years old who can hold the screen in a chamber film, shot almost entirely in one interior. Especially – bright, charismatic men who know how to play that inner weakness that makes them show external strength in relation to an even weaker and more vulnerable partner. And this, it seems to me, is the whole point of domestic violence – it is always compensation for one’s own weakness. Nikita played this role brilliantly.

In Russian cinema, it seems to me, a canon of films shot in sterile interiors has begun to take shape, in which the characters, usually middle-class people, have nothing to breathe: this is Pyotr Todorovsky’s “Healthy Man”, and Tamara Dondurei’s “Nearby”, and “The Season of the Year”. winter” by Svetlana Ustinova. How important was it for you to place your heroes in such a faceless apartment and would something change if your heroes lived not in a new building, but, for example, in the center of St. Petersburg or Moscow?

Domestic violence occurs both in small Khrushchev apartments and in huge penthouses in the center of Moscow, so the plot of the story would not change. But I think that the “locked” characters of Russian cinema in the interiors may be a consequence of the pandemic years, and, by the way, during this time, the percentage of domestic violence around the world has increased. The women found themselves locked up with the men in apartments where they literally could not get out.

Also, alcohol consumption has increased.

Yes, but we really wanted to get away from the image of a drinking man hitting his wife, because this is a harmful cliché that makes many people turn away from the problem. And on the interior, we worked very carefully with production designer Marfa Gudkova, specifically creating a space that would emphasize the feeling of hopelessness. For example, we built a narrowing corridor. In the same place, only a week passes in the film, and every day the corridor from the front door to the bathroom narrows. We rebuilt it several times and gradually narrowed it, so that when the heroine walks on it in the final, it is 40 centimeters narrower than it was on the first day. And if the viewer does not see it, then he will feel that where Anya used to pass freely, now she rests sideways on the chest of drawers.

Nadezhda Markina, who plays the mother of the hero Nikita Efremov, seems to have come to your film straight from Zvyagintsev’s Elena.

“Elena” is also, in a certain sense, a film about a destructive family, and, having taken Nadezhda for this role, we, of course, had this in mind. But in the “Sisters” Markin passes an important path for me from denial to acceptance. She finds herself in a situation where the truth falls out on her, which is very difficult for anyone to survive. And in the end, she believes in a stranger, and not in her own son, and this is her tragedy, but also her some kind of strength, capable of breaking all this mutual responsibility of violence and lies. This image is dear to me, because at some point we, as a society, will also have to face the terrible truth, and in the choice that Markina makes in The Sisters, there is, it seems to me, that hope that is so lacking today.

But in your film, there is no way out of the system of domestic violence, except for the physical elimination of the source of violence. Is it a tribute to the genre or your conceptual understanding of the problem?

Here I am afraid, to be honest, of such an interpretation. “Sisters” is still not a social video where there is a slogan at the end that explains everything. In the film, we show how everything can end in the absence of civilized ways to solve this problem. Yes, our heroine formally got rid of this horror that threatened her and her child. But she still remained in a hopeless situation, and this is not a happy ending at all. When a cornered person has no way out, he can cause terrible evil in the world, and the consequences for all will be catastrophic. But we did not make a film about the fact that only the grave will correct the rapist, and we do not believe in it.

In theaters from 24 November

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