Stopped time

“Summer” is the first film by Vadim Kostrov, which got into the official Russian distribution. Meanwhile, the 24-year-old director has already made several films, some of which, including this one, have earned the attention of critics and festivals in Sheffield, Marseille, Lisbon. The fact that the author of “Summer” is strikingly different from typical domestic debutants was convinced Andrey Plakhov.

If you don’t know anything about Kostrov and just watch “Summer”, the otherness and unusualness will catch your eye by themselves. It’s like a feature film and like a documentary. Nothing special happens in it, the camera simply observes the course of life, captures an unrehearsed, unstaged reality. She, the camera, as if spellbound, shoots village landscapes and night flashes of metallurgical plants for ten minutes. All this is reminiscent of impressionist painting: although time moves in it, it does not hurry anywhere, and at some point it seems that it has stopped forever. The sound range is not forced either – natural, so different from the excited, hysterical dialogue intonations characteristic of the new Russian cinema.

You can try to describe the movie in terms of plot and characters. Several of its episodes were filmed at the height of summer in Nizhny Tagil and its environs. Only by some details you can guess that this is not happening today, but fifteen years ago. Eight-year-old Vadik and his older sister spend their holidays with their grandmother, in a house with a garden, and at the end they return to their winter apartment, in a panel high-rise building. On summer evenings, Kristina meets around the campfire with a group of her peers and, separately, with Pasha, a funny stutterer. Grandmother instructs Vadim, on the one hand, to study, on the other hand, to the word of God and obedience, which is “better than refined gold.” An inquisitive boy wants to know if it can rain on the moon and dreams of flying into space. But it is not the future cosmonaut that is felt in him, but the future director Vadim Kostrov, busy with questions: how, sitting by the window and looking at the forest, to see the rain, how to capture a rainbow? The window is a frame of the future film, and the author shoots it from his childhood past.

At the same time, there is nothing to do with the infantile “retro” with which directors often begin their journey into the cinema. There is a calm confidence in Kostrov’s position, rather surprising at his age. He doesn’t try to cram everything that’s good and bad into one film, knowing that others are ahead and everything has its time. He does not try to integrate into the industrial system with its dull demand to “tell a story” – while Kostrov shoots not according to the training manual and not for the “target audience”.

He perfectly understands that he is making “a movie not for everyone”, that he will not have a big rental, but those who are supposed to find and appreciate it. Shoots on a cheap camera with friends as performers or with documentary characters; among them are representatives of the Nizhny Tagil art underground. This, perhaps, is the most important thing: Kostrov finds technological opportunities to implement his projects practically without a budget, repeating the experience of the old “new waves” at a new round of cinematography. He proves that creative ideas are the main thing, and funding, for which most beginners are ready to sell their souls to the devil and beat the thresholds of ministerial pitchings, which have long turned into an instrument of censorship, is secondary.

Such marginal cinema, born far from the mainstream, does not have absolute artistic quality. But it solves another serious problem. Kostrov’s generation fell into the funnel of broken time, it is not easy to get out of it, and someone will call this generation lost. However, it also has the right to its voice, to evidence that it exists. “Summer”, “Winter”, “Folk”, “Orpheus” and other films by Kostrov – this is irrefutable evidence of existence.