Russian khton and tin: how the audience remembers the film festival in Vyborg

A mathematician, writer, film and theater director of unprecedented productivity, Roman Mikhailov managed to make three films in a year. And this happens if you don’t take money from the state, make movies practically on your knees with friends and friends of friends, including high-class artists – Yevgeny Tkachuk, Fyodor Lavrov, Oleg Ryazantsev, Yura Borisov, Kirill Polukhin, Yulia Marchenko.

“Vacation in October”, according to the director, is a treatise written in patterns about the nature of time, in which we understand nothing. He says flowery, but the movie shoots mind-blowing. Fantasy is not enough to imagine something like that.

The main character of Sveta, an aspiring actress (Maria Matsel), dreams of acting in a real movie, not in serials. And here it is, happiness – a Bollywood director came to Russia and launched a project with the participation of stars. It does not matter that they are carrying the same artists as Sveta to the site in a cargo van. Everything is real, although no one understands anything.

The film crew lives in a hotel in the middle of a zombie space. Around – natives, as if from the other world. Necrorealism, it turns out, is alive, and the unforgettable director Yufit has followers, with some allowance for time. It is a pity that the line of local ghouls has not been worked out to the end.

In their free time, filmmakers have fun playing in the 70s – again they, dear ones, surfaced on the screen, replacing the bored 90s. Now they are being mythologised, turned into phantom pain. The essence of the game is that its participants watch a fragment of a Soviet film, and then reproduce it on their own, plunging into the bygone era. Roman Mikhailov himself admitted that he once watched Soviet cinema, like dreams.

On the wall is a portrait of Brezhnev. His chest is heavily hung with orders. Under the portrait is the boss. He is working on a subordinate who is cheating on his wife. If he doesn’t get better, a comrades’ court will punish him. It’s funny to us now, but once it was a common thing. That distant life frightens the light. She wants to cry from her. She does not understand how it was possible to live so dull.

Professor Kulikov came to the premiere in Vyborg, the same one who expounded the idea of ​​​​the cosmic origin of fly agarics in the television program of Sergei Sholokhov and Sergei Kuryokhin “Lenin is a mushroom”. In Roman Mikhailov, he talks about the zombification of the viewer in the days of the USSR due to the special coating of the Svema film, which was filmed by Soviet filmmakers. All this is very funny and turns an already absurd life into an even greater phantasmagoria. It is curious that they filmed “Vacation in October” on an old camera used in the painting “War” by Alexei Balabanov.

After the show, the young spectator said strange things, it even seemed that she was specially planted for the sake of the performance. And she said the following: “I have a dacha nearby, and I constantly look at the festival. Your film was shown last year. Is this a cut of the budget? Roman Mikhailov found something to answer: “The film was last year, and next year we are also going to the festival with it, the government will send it to us …”

In fact, Mikhailov chose a different path – not to take anything from the state, because he believes that state funding is a disaster for culture and science. If this channel is blocked, then an outbreak of subcultures will begin. Actually, what Roman himself does is a subculture.

It is a pity that the jury headed by Sergei Ursulyak did not mark this unusual and timely picture in any way, because festivals exist for that, to encourage creative pursuits, and not the middle peasants.

Stas Ivanov also shot the film “One Day” about Russian Khton, who has behind him “Nemtsev”, “UZZZ”, a solid list of other series, which makes itself felt in the excessive style of his full-length film. The picture was awarded a special prize “For the rapprochement of author’s cinema with the audience.”

Semyon (Anton Vasiliev) is a quite prosperous man in his prime. He lives in Moscow, he does not remember his native town Bui until his father falls ill, his mother calls and says that he must come. Buoy, like a quagmire, will begin to suck. You just can’t get out of it. Ghosts of the past, former classmates will surround you like ominous shadows. The daughter of the former beloved Maya Rodina will remind Semyon of his youth, incredible speculations will arise in his head.

When the girl’s name is pronounced in a tongue twister, it does not sound Maya, but My. “My Motherland” makes money on bread and cheap wine in the train with songs accompanied by a guitar. In Bui, she is like the heroine of Dostoevsky, the fatal Nastasya Filippovna, the male world is bubbling around her.

The homeland was played by a talented debutante, a recent graduate of the Moscow Art Theater School, Elizaveta Strunina. “I myself grew up in the Vladimir region in the same environment. This is not my life, but I watched it,” said the actress. She did not need any special immersion in the proposed circumstances.

Once in Vyborg, I was lucky to meet and talk while walking around the city with the outstanding writer Yuri Mamleev, who came to the festival. That’s who could describe hton of our life. Filmmakers are far from it. They are more often able to paint fat pictures of frightening reality, to look down on simple provincial people. Going to the people ends badly for the intelligentsia.

Stas Ivanov said that he wanted to shoot something wild and funny. He achieved his goal, it turned out the quintessence of Russian tin. As an impressionable viewer noted, our buoys will not sink, they will swim to Moscow, and only there they will pay attention at the top to “our rampage”.

“Zaya, I’m sorry” – written on the fence. Poor Maya Motherland. This applies to her too. Stas Ivanov made a movie about broken connections, appealed to his father sitting in the front row: “When my son was born, there was a fear that I was not giving something to my dad. What you disowned 20 years ago will certainly make itself felt.”

But the story is not only local, it is fatal, about the country, and was written by screenwriter Dmitry Sobolev, who is known for Pavel Lungin’s “Island” and the comedy “Kolkhoz Entertainment” by Maxim Voronkov. So we live between holiness and madness.