The Ministry of Culture did not issue a distribution certificate for Alexander Sokurov’s film “Fairy Tale”

The Ministry of Culture refused to issue a distribution certificate for Alexander Sokurov’s film “The Fairy Tale.” The director’s press service announced this on October 14 in its Telegram channel, calling this refusal “another stage of censorship.” The day before, the film was banned from showing at the KARO.Art festival, held at the Moscow Oktyabr film center, where it was supposed to be the closing film on October 15. Perhaps this is the first time that censorship restrictions have affected a director of this level – a People’s Artist of the Russian Federation and a member of the Human Rights Council under the President of Russia. Comments Julia Shagelman.

A document on the refusal to issue a rental certificate signed by the director of the Department of Cinematography and Digital Development of the Ministry of Culture Dmitry Davidenko, dated October 13, was published in her Telegram– channel journalist Ksenia Sobchak. She also said that she organized a private screening of the film “for close friends and serious producers” and that now she is “ashamed of Sokurov.” As the reason for its decision, the department refers to subparagraph “g” of paragraph 18 approved by the government in 2016 rules issuance, refusal to issue and revocation of a film rental certificate. The wording of this subparagraph is as vague as possible: “in other cases determined by federal laws.” Thus, in essence, the reason for the ban on the distribution of “Fairy Tales” has not been named. The Ministry of Culture did not respond to Kommersant’s request at the time the issue was submitted.

Let us recall that the world premiere of Sokurov’s film took place in 2022 at the Locarno Film Festival. After this, the film was released in a number of European countries, including France, Spain and Italy, as well as Iran, and is now preparing for its release in Latin America.

Filmed without government financial assistance, The Tale is a phantasmagoric parable set in purgatory.

Key political figures of the 20th century – Stalin, Hitler, Churchill and Mussolini – wander around it, talking about wars and ideologies, as well as art and private life. Ultimately, it all comes down to the futility of imperial ambitions and dictatorial pride – the rulers of the world, who ruled thousands of people and destroyed them for the sake of speculative ideas and their own ambition, are doomed to oblivion.

In Russia, screening films at international festivals does not require a distribution certificate, the process of obtaining which can take several months. However, in order to have the right to show such paintings, the festival must be included in a special register approved by the Ministry of Culture. A list of films scheduled for screening is also sent for approval.

The KARO.Art festival, organized this year for the second time on the basis of the project of the same name by the Karo cinema chain, announced its program on the 20th of September. Even then, “The Tale” was announced as the closing film. Prior to this, the film was first shown in Russia at the “Example of Intonation” festival, organized by Sokurov’s foundation of the same name and held in St. Petersburg from June 1 to June 4 this year.

However, on October 13, the director reported to Telegramthat the Ministry of Culture banned the screening of the film at the KARO.Art festival. The festival’s press secretary, Ksenia Ilyinykh, and the curator of its Russian program, Sergei Deshin, refused to comment on the reasons for the disappearance of the film from the schedule. Mr. Sokurov emphasized: “The refusal to issue a distribution certificate for “The Tale” is ahead – a censorious ban on showing the film in my homeland.” Which is what happened the very next day. The director also wrote that he expected an unspoken ban on the showing of all his previously created cinematic works, and stated: “I am not just protesting against censorship – I am protesting against the violation of my constitutional right to freely communicate my works with my compatriots.”

The “Fairy Tale” story is far from the first example of how the system of rental certificates, created in the 1990s as a means of combating piracy, has turned into an instrument of state censorship.

For almost twenty years, obtaining a “release” was a purely bureaucratic formality for entering a film into the State Register of Film and Video Films and obtaining an age rating. The first refusals in connection with the content of films appeared after Vladimir Medinsky became Minister of Culture. So, in 2015, two days before the release, the certificate already issued to Daniel Espinosa’s thriller “Number 44” about the search for a serial killer in the Stalinist USSR was revoked. In 2018, Armando Ianucci’s black political comedy “The Death of Stalin” suffered the same fate.

At the end of 2022, the Russian government increased the list of grounds for refusal to issue a rental certificate and its revocation – measures were added to the new decree to implement the law banning LGBT propaganda. It was on this basis that in March 2023 the certificate was revoked from “Coupe number 6” by Juho Kuosmanen, which received two awards at the Cannes Film Festival and was released in 2021 (now the film can still be legally watched in online cinemas).

The last high-profile case of censorship in cinema before “The Tale” was the removal from online cinemas. thriller “Aita” by Stepan Burnashev, awarded for best director and male role at the Winter festival in December 2022 and became the highest-grossing Yakut film at the Russian box office. In September of this year, Roskomnadzor discovered in the film a demonstration of “inequality of persons based on nationality,” although the moral of the film, not only shown through cinematic means, but also directly spoken from the screen, is precisely that all peoples need to live together. Film critics, film experts and many film industry professionals, including Alexander Sokurov, stood up for the film.

Almost simultaneously with the ban on showing “Aity” the website SakhaDay reported that the issuance of a certificate was denied to another Yakut film – Dmitry Shadrin’s comedy “The Candidate”, one of the characters of which dresses in women’s clothing for adventurous purposes, like the hero of the film “Hello, I’m your aunt!”: in this, according to According to the publication’s sources, the Ministry of Culture has already noticed the same “LGBT propaganda.”

Back in 2021 in an interview TASS Mr. Sokurov demanded that the Ministry of Culture “change this entire procedure for issuing permits (rental) certificates, which, in essence, is censorship.” However, judging by the growing number of refusals to issue certificates, revocations of already issued permits and the increasingly blurred criteria due to which films may fall under an explicit or implicit ban, one should not expect such changes, rather the opposite.