“Lack of dialogue between generations literally kills” – Weekend

The Russian premiere of Alisa Khazanova’s film “White List” will take place in St. Petersburg at the “Example of Intonation” festival. She wrote the script for the film together with Roman Volobuev. After the aesthetic “Shards”, a free adaptation of “Last Year in Marienbad” by Alain Resnais, Khazanova unexpectedly shot a genre story: “White List” – an investigation film that atmospherically and structurally refers to “Memories of a Murder” by Pong Chun Ho. A strong genre shell is needed by Khazanova to talk about a topic taboo in Russian society: investigators performed by Alexei Serebryakov and Vladimir Averyanov are investigating teenage “groups of death.” Dry statistics are given in the credits: in 2019, 3 teenagers committed suicide in Russia every day, there is no data for the following years in the public domain. Alisa Khazanova spoke about the lack of dialogue in society, the generation of “blue whales” and the impossibility of a teenage rebellion Konstantin Shavlovsky.

How and why did you and Roma Volobuev decide to go to the cinema with such material?

We finished editing “Shards” just as Galina Mursaliyeva’s sensational article in Novaya Gazeta about “groups of death” came out, and Roma wrote some critical post that really offended me. We clashed over this post, this article – and literally overnight the White List synopsis appeared, and then very quickly, following the fresh tracks, we wrote the first draft of the script. And then they began to look for funding, and it turned out to be more difficult than one could imagine – the topic is such that many producers were afraid to even hear about it.

And you yourself were not afraid to take it?

Of course it’s scary. But I can say what motivated me. I have two daughters, the eldest at that time was 13 years old. In general, it turns out that we are the first generation of parents who are faced with the fact that children live on the Internet, and we don’t understand shit about it. And I felt that as a parent I really miss talking about what problems children can have and how to deal with it. How to build a conversation with your child. And for me it was more important to make this movie just to start a dialogue than to be afraid that someone will react to it in a wrong way. I believe that we are sorely lacking dialogue on such complex topics. Now, in principle, it doesn’t exist, but if we take the topic of teenage suicides, then it is simply hushed up. We have such a strange attitude to this: if you don’t talk about the problem, then it’s as if it doesn’t exist or it will somehow disappear by itself. And this silence, this lack of dialogue between generations literally kills – because the problem does not disappear anywhere and is not solved in any way. This is not exclusively a Russian story, waves of teenage suicides occur all over the world. But in other countries there is at least a civilized conversation on this topic, including with platforms where children spend a lot of time.

Have you consulted with your daughters?

Then they were still small, but the film was made for a long time, the script was refined and rewritten, but we still got into covid with filming. So at some point – yes, we began to talk about it, and of course, I consulted with them.

What do they think of your film?

When my eldest daughter looked at it, she said: “Mom, how cool that you did it, because everything was so. I felt like I was back in time, in the way I remember it.” For me it was valuable, because this is a very dangerous thing and we were always afraid to go somewhere in the wrong place.

And were there moments when self-censorship worked, when you beat yourself on the hands?

We were careful not to show anything that could be perceived by anyone as a romanticization. In general, we tried to treat this topic as carefully as possible, because it is impossible not to think about the feelings of people who had to go through all this. But at the same time, it seems, we did not bypass sharp corners, where it seemed important, we did not try to mitigate anything.

It seems that there is too much confusing and incomprehensible in this topic: on the one hand, many experts attribute the “groups of death” to teenage network folklore, and on the other hand, in Russia, people are in prison under the article on incitement to suicide. Have you studied a lot of documents, studies?

The fact that a lot of rubbish sticks to such stories, we made a film, but for this, in fact, we did not need to dive into it. We have studied everything that is in the public domain, but the White List is still an artistic study, not a documentary. So we didn’t sit in the archives at night – and, most likely, no one would have let us in there. As I said, we don’t have such a problem at all, it doesn’t exist at the official level. What the statistics at the end of the film speaks quite eloquently. But I consulted a lot with psychologists and psychiatrists who work with teenagers. And the main thing that I took away from communicating with them is that the waves of teenage suicides are a fairly new phenomenon, the world has been living with this for only fifteen years. That is, they were always there, but they were not of a mass nature. Everything has changed before our eyes.

Did you immediately decide that it would be a genre story?

Yes, because the genre is a conversation about morality, about fundamental things, about the categories of good and evil. Here he was needed.

Did Serebryakov also immediately appear as an investigator?

Yes, we, one might say, wrote the script for it. I remember when Alexey read the script and we had a zoom, he said: “Guys, everything is cool, but I already played it 150 times!” And I answered: “Alexey, it is this fatigue from you that I need.” That is, I needed a person who had done all this many, many times already. And his fatigue from such roles, in my opinion, greatly benefited his hero.

Why, by the way, are your investigators male? Was it tempting to make them women?

Was. But we decided that since we are filming a genre, we will use a kind of stencil. And then, there are a lot of girl heroines in this story, and I wanted these adult guys to see how they were dying, and could not do anything about it. And how differently their psyche will react to it.

And you didn’t think to go into horror, because “blue whales” are online folklore?

No, because I’m not a horror person. I am very afraid to watch horror films myself, and therefore I cannot imagine myself directing them. I understand that a horror on such a topic, oddly enough, could somehow even smooth out and cover up the real horror that we are talking about. But we did not have such a task.

The idea to cross the story of the Blue Whales with scandals around violence in schools and other closed institutions where adults abuse their power over children – was it also in the first draft?

Yes, because it was in the air. I think these things are definitely connected, and if we scratch through some urban legend or network myth, then we will most likely find this connection.

Is it possible to formulate the main idea of ​​your film like this: behind any myth and legend there is a very specific real violence, so you should not brush aside conspiracy theories – it, like a flag on a map, indicates a problem?

Yes. This is probably close to what we are talking about.

If The White List is an artistic study, then what did you understand about the generation of, relatively speaking, “blue whales”?

I do not presume to say that I understand about them more than others. They live in a different information environment, where all information is available in one click. And what we had to look for may not even be of interest to them. But because there is so much information and it is so easily accessible, they have a much more fragile psyche. And they also miss the conversation. An honest conversation with parents where they can speak openly without fear of being themselves. Because this closeness of theirs comes from the fear of getting a completely wrong reaction – the fear of being judged, misunderstood, punished. Unloved.

Why do you think teenagers have become the main characters in Russian cinema over the past few years?

It seems to me that not only in Russia, but all over the world, attention in the cinema has shifted to teenagers. Think End of the Fucking World or Euphoria. I am not a film critic, but I will name a few reasons offhand. Firstly, teenagers are the main trendsetters, in many respects, by the way, due to social networks, where they are active and set fashion. Teenagers had the same TikTok at first, only then adults came there, ruined everything, and teenagers left there. Therefore, adults have a real curiosity about this generation, about how they live. They are generally some interesting, they are not like us, we do not understand what drives them. Secondly, we are the first generation that is so deeply interested in our psychology, our emotions and traumas. Our mothers and grandmothers did not have this. And we peer into our childhood, where we look for the roots of our problems. Therefore, perhaps for some, a film about teenagers is a way to rewind their lives and try to remember what happened there. Explore your traumas through another, next generation. And thirdly, many people now think differently about the world in which our children grow up. What is it like to be a young person in today’s world? Our parents and the parents of our parents had an image of the future for their children, and we have a big question mark in this place. And so, I think, the main voice in the cinema today belongs to teenagers. They are honest, they are not cynical, they can say to the face of the world what the world does not want to hear.

Do you think this generation can get seriously angry at the world? Or will they close themselves off rather than confront him, and is the problem of rising teenage suicides the ultimate way to express their disagreement? Tell the world “bye” instead of, relatively speaking, going out to the square?

You know, they don’t really want to get angry at all. They don’t understand why anger should be the leading emotion. And they, of course, choose the path of isolation. It seems to me that they do not know how to get angry and scream, so if you do not listen to them, then trouble can happen.

The film will also be released on the KION platform in autumn.

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