Tag: Russia

The Execution (Kazn)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TRANSYLVANIA

This is a crime thriller with enough twists to make Agatha Christie proud. An unpredictable, non-linear serial killer drama from Russia, Execution is a bloody, bruise and highly nasty film from debut director Lado Kvataniya. With echoes of Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-Ho, 2003), Old Boy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) and David Fincher’s Mindhunter (2017-19) and Zodiac (2007), The Execution a confident and exciting genre picture that doubles up as an allegory of the last, fading days of the Soviet Union.

It’s freely inspired by the true story of Andrei Tchikatilo, who murdered, sexually assaulted and mutilated at least 52 women and children in the 80s 80s. While the USA had experience building psychological profiles of killers from the mid-20th century, this was the first time the Soviet Union had to pursue such a case, leading to much confusion among the politburo.

Nikoloz Tavadze is perfect in the main role as the lead investigator in the case. With a similar gait and frame to Ivan Lapshin in Alexey German’s classic My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985), he occupies a similar world of paranoia and crumbling institutions, with lone men given free rein to be both judge, jury and execution. With intense pressure from above, the police commit unspeakable brutality in order to pursue their cases, showing how the solution can often approximate the same level of the problem. The myth of the Etruscan Execution is invoked, whereby the perpetrator is attached to the body of the victim until both bodies turn black. Of course, we’ll see something to that effect by the end, but its how it gets there that keeps us riveted throughout.

The film starts in 1991, but the killer starts in 1978, the film freely hopping between and playing with time, slowly revealing layer after layer during its luxurious runtime. The non-linear approach is a smart one, as the story is as much about how information is doled out as what we know from the start. And no matter how much you predict what’s going to happen, there’s simply no way to have a clear grip on how brilliantly this film reaches its final conclusion.

Mixing a romantic atmosphere with the utter darkness of man, it often feels more South Korean than Russian, especially in the way that lurid violence is tied to character and its portentous sense of destiny and forward momentum. While it often strains towards the absurd, its excesses seem necessary given the lurid subject matter. All the while, the heads of state seem useless to stop the killer or rein in the reckless behaviour of its officers. Considering torture is still commonplace in Russian prisons, it has an all-too present day resonance.

Considering that it’s from Russia, the chances of it playing in the UK are incredibly slim. Yet one hopes that when the awful invasion is finally over, it will have a chance to be discovered as a solid genre programmer worth pursuing.

The Execution plays in Competition at TIFF, running from 17th to 26th June.

The Natural History of Destruction

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM CANNES!

The Natural History of Destruction asks a simple question: is bombing civilian populations justified in the name of war? It seems to be the only question in the film, asked again and again and again, as Sergei Loznitsa shows us endless images of the mechanics, banality and brutality of war: leaving endless, merciless destruction in its wake in search of a bigger cause. Ostensibly about the allied bombing of Germany — which is estimated to have killed between 350,000 to 635,000 people while crippling the country’s armaments production — the film’s timely premiere resonates in the current moment, with Russia’s campaign of terror demolishing cities in Ukraine as this review is being written.

Created exclusively with archive footage courtesy of both British and German collections, Loznitsa’s latest is a WW2 film that feels contemporaneous, mixing black-and-white observational footage with painstaking re-recordings to show us the total dehumanisation of war.

We start with sketches of everyday German life, people out and about in town, heading to biergartens and cafes, singing songs and going to work. Evening arrives, the picture zooms out and these scenes are reduced to momentary lights in the ground, strikingly light up by the advent of cluster-bombs.

I didn’t just see Rostock, Lübeck, Cologne and Berlin while watching this film. I saw Mariupol, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Further back, it evokes NATO campaigns in Baghdad and Belgrade, or Putin’s levelling of Grozny, all committed in the name of the “greater good”. No matter who is waging war and who is on the so-called right side of history, the final effects are the same: dead people, flattened buildings, the complete vanquishing of hope and humanity.

Occasionally the silent-film-like images are punctuated by speeches. One British army official asks the German population to simply leave the cities and camp out in the countryside, a simplistic solution that betrays the reality of living in a country during the war. He goes on to say that although a campaign of bombing on this scale has never been tried before, it will make an “interesting experiment.”

And while war historians might agree that the bombing itself was justified in that it ground German production to its knees, allowing Soviet Union and American forces to sweep in and take Berlin, absolutists can claim the moral high ground: no victory could possibly be worth this much death and destruction. But Loznitsa avoids any editorial process — no talking heads, no narration, no moral grandstanding — and allows us to come to our own conclusions; starting debates instead of finishing them.

It’s this complexity, as well as seeking the humanity in a people that overwhelmingly supported the Nazis, that make him a complex figure. Only recently was he kicked out of the Ukrainian film academy for his ties to Russia and for speaking out against a widespread boycott, while at the same time, many of his fiction films have also been accused of Russophobia. In my view, this controversy is probably the sign of an independent filmmaker.

One thing you can say about Loznitsa is that he’s both a deep thinker and a prolific filmmaker (this is his third documentary in two years). Nonetheless, clocking in at just under 110 minutes long, his images are exhaustive and enervating, at once deeply terrifying and rather monotonous. His documentaries, like Victory Day, which stretched to over an hour despite only having enough material to justify a 20-minute short, has the habit of just making the same point over and over again. While the intention is to conclusively batter home the horrors of aerial warfare, the length and duration of certain images, which repeat themselves without revealing any new layers, struck me as unnecessary. The deeply-felt moral question the film raises is a highly important one, making it even more disappointing the finished product makes this such an alienating picture to sit through.

The Natural History of Destruction plays in the Official Selection as a Special Screening at Cannes. No UK release date yet.

Medea

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

This is a movie about deserts, both physically and of the mind. It features a character so fully realised and so compelling, we could easily follow her in and out of her emotional and spiritual turmoil for hours upon end. Georgian actress Tinatin Dalakishvili stars as a Russian woman based on the classic Greek myth, completely in command of her craft as she commits atrocious deeds while attempting to look for redemption for her sins.

The film is structured around an act of atonement, the titular character confessing her wrongdoings in an Orthodox Church somewhere in Israel. We begin in medias res, with her reciting her and her husband’s (Evgeniy Tsyganov) plans to move from Russia to the Holy Land, taking advantage of his Jewish heritage to build a new life together. The Greek Myth is transplanted to the modern phenomenon of post-Soviet immigration to Israel, many Jews from Russia, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine using the opportunity to leave their world behind for a country beset with its own myriad clashes of cultures and ideals.

Is a new life possible or are you always bringing yourself and the baggage of your life with you? Even if you have a home, whether it’s in a settlement or in Jerusalem, can you be fully content? Medea suggests that Russian expats can never leave the past behind, using its mythical structure as a fascinating basis to explore both national identity and wider existential problems.

A rift forms in the relationship. To make up for it, she has sex with other men. Lots and lots of sex. Name a position and you’ll probably see it in this movie. But this is not just sex for the sake of it, but as an exploration of character. This is a woman in search of any way to reduce the natural aging process — whether through sex, religion or chemical solutions, she will stop at nothing in order to find a cure to the void at her centre. In the Holy Land, fulfilment is never far away either, suggesting that religion is basically a form of intercourse for the physically abstinent.

While these sex scenes will make the headlines, far more compelling scenes are found in the quiet conversations she has around Israel, whether its chats with a watch-maker about creating a watch that ticks backwards or a Mossad agent who can predict the future. It’s great to watch a film take its natural time, creating a unique journey of female self-fulfilment with a performance on a par with the likes of Tao Zhao in Ash is Purest White (Jia Zhangke, 2018) or Isabelle Huppert in Things To Come (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016).

The ideas are so potent and the central character so fascinating, and the discourse so endless — I’m not getting into the myriad power dynamics at play here — it’s easy to forgive the winding, digressive road Medea takes. It’s not just about dialogue and character either, director Alexander Zeldovich keen to use cinematic language — through vast widescreen tableaus, surveillance-like long shots and primal imagery — to stress his points. This is greatly abetted by (and would be a very different film without) Alexey Retinsky’s score, evoking both Igor Stravinsky and Mica Levi in its experimentation, rhythmic presence and kitchen-sink collection of sounds, spanning choral music, techno rumblings and full-on expressionist orchestra to create a truly epic feel. At times it’s too much, but hey, when you swing for the fences, it’s worth hitting that ball as hard as you can.

After all, a film like Medea needs to be an epic. This is a proper myth of the desert, as resonant as any action-adventure or melodramatic journeyman story, a woman with a vast void at her centre trying anything that sticks to fill that hole. Made with true urgency and a sense of inevitability, Medea is cinema at its most spiritually probing. Just make sure to look past all the shagging.

Medea plays in Concorso internazionale at Locarno Film Festival, running from August 4th to 15th.

Son of Sofia (O gios tis Sofias)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The year is 2004. The Olympic Games are finally returning to their birthplace of Greece. Along with the Russian Olympic team, Misha (Victor Khomut) arrives in Athens for the first time to be reunited with his mother. He is a true little Russian boy, with a Gera the Krokodil t-shirt and a Cheburashka doll affixed to his backpack, a reference to the two stars of the classic Soviet animation. Nervous to be in a new country, things turn worse when his mother Sofia (Valery Tscheplanowa) introduces him to his father-in-law Mr Nikos (Thanasis Papageorgiou).

Using the familial conflict genre while refracting it through dark fairy tales that reference both Greek and Russian traditions, Son of Sofia is a reflection on matters both domestic and national. The first sense we get that this relationship is somewhat transactional is reflected through Sofia’s marriage to Mr Nikos, who didn’t really marry him for love but in order to secure financial stability and as a means to get her son across to Greece.

There’s no doubt that Mr Nikos stands for an older side of the Greek country, one that is being irreparably changed by modern advancements and the rise of immigration. While the young lad doesn’t speak a word of Greek, Mr Nikos takes it upon himself to lecture him in the culture and language of the Hellenic nation. He was once the star of a Mr Rogers-style children’s show, replete with animal mascots that pervade the more surrealistic moments of the film.

Son of Sofia

Scored to classic Soviet songs, these moments show the strange headspace of the young, mostly mute young boy at odds with the new world around him. There are larger themes at work here. With the 2004 Olympics proving economically ruinous for the country ahead of their later financial collapse, Son of Sofia examines the thornier side and deeper cost of Greek pride. The 1980 Moscow mascot, Misha the bear is also given a strange makeover here — meant to be a cutesy and likeable teddy, he becomes a strange and malevolent force.

These conflicts are shot in a staid, stately and slow style, capturing characters through hallways and long corridors. Without much sense of spectacle, we rely heavily on watching them watching television, whether it is the television show Little Vera, the Athens Olympics — which we are told feature various Russian athletes competing as Greeks — and Nr Nikos’ show. Perhaps they could’ve been incorporated into this fantasy-world a little more forcefully, but they create a haunting and sad effect that lingers across the entirety of this unique semi-fantasy film.

While the middle part of the movie, involving Misha running away and becoming involved with other Russian-speaking youths is a little thinly drawn, the film really comes into focus during its final third, which manages to resolve the central conflict at the heart of the story without compromising on its own vision. It suggests that progress can be made, but at quite a difficult cost.

You can watch Son of Sofia during the entire month of December for free with ArteKino – just click here.

Stars Await Us

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

A Chinese man is released from prison in Siberia ahead of the New Year. HIs name is Ma Biao (Liang Jingdong) and he appears to speak not a word of the country’s language. He occupies a strange space: both coming into its own after the collapse of the Soviet Union and bordering neighbouring China, a blend of cultures and ideas yet to realise itself. A song during a concert celebrating the New Year seems to encapsulate the paradoxical nature of society: singing of a better society while praising the great state of the now collapsed Soviet Union.

Stars Await Us, a Chinese film made in Siberia, pays homage to the traditions of both Chinese and Russian national cinema. This is film in a minor key, an endless melancholic reflection of how the choices we make haunt us told in long, slow takes and long, slow movements. While occupying a runtime that recalls trends in recent Chinese cinema while filled with the nostalgia that suffuses post-Soviet cinema, it is a cross-cultural tale of great academic interest but ultimately lacking in spirit.

Liang Jingdong, a regular in the films of Chinese royalty Jia Zhang-ke, plays Ma Biao as a sad, melancholic man, searching for his ex-girlfriend Karinna (Viktoria Ivanova) — seen dancing at a club in happier times. He shares his new apartment with Su (Zakharov Evgenij Sergeevich), a local policeman who cosplays as a clown. He walks around the rapidly changing snow-filled town looking for something, often trying to strike up a conversation with a woman (Hai Qing) who sells bread from a stall. But when he walks into a local bar and sees a Russian woman performing “Blue Train” — made popular in classic Soviet animation Gena the Crocodile — this reignites his quest to find the woman he once loved. In many ways he is like his companion Cheburashka, a foreigner in a foreign place, navigating a strange world.

But don’t expect any closure, or even any explanation of why he is found himself on the wrong side of the border. Traditional narrative structures are elided in favour of panoramic, sweeping takes and elliptical storytelling. Gangsters, often the focus of Chinese cinema, especially Zhang-ke, are giving the classical Chinese treatment. In Russian cinema they would be a little in your face, here they haunt the periphery of the story, threatening violence behind every slow and well-shot corner.

While the film is undoubtedly handsomely-shot, scored by a variety of Soviet disco classics, there doesn’t seem to be much that really brings Chinese and Russian culture together. At one point Ma Biao attends a Kino concert — the famous perestroika-era band who were the face of the changing Russian society — and while watching Viktor Tsoi strut his stuff, he seems to finally let go and enjoy himself. But Viktor Tsoi, perhaps the most prominent Asian-Russian of all time, albeit of Korean descent, would die that same year in a car crash, his loss a symbol of what the new Russia could’ve been. What this means in the context of the story is hard to say, which avoids easy categorisation in favour of severe ambiguity.

These stories exploring post-Soviet legacy while remaining nostalgic for its culture have become popular in recent years, especially in film festivals such as Tallinn. And there is a case to be made for the similarities between the two cultures, which both endured communism and changed towards a capitalist system in radically different ways. But there are more succinct and heart-wrenching examples out there. From this festival alone, we could recommend Goodbye Soviet Union, also referencing Gena the Crocodile and his companion Cheburashka, as a more touching and well-packaged version of seismic post-Communist changes.

Stars Await Us plays as part of the main competition of the Tallinn Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November.

Sententia (Sentensia)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

[dropcapT[/dropcap]error and tedium coexist in Sententia, charting the last moments of the censored Russian writer Varlam Shalamov. A slow and studied film in the manner of classic arthouse Soviet film, it is a poetic and forbidding work that rewards close attention and strong willpower.

Censored in his time — and forced to spend 17 years in the gulag for his support of Leon Trotsky and praise of emigre Ivan Bunin — Shalamov (Aleksandr Ryazantsev) is at the end of his days in Sententia, visited upon by two young men who want to preserve his work and smuggle it out of the country. Barely able to move, they help him to compose the last words to his final poem, shot in an endless long take that is likely to test the patience of audiences.

Shot in black-and-white 16mm, with plenty of crackle in the frame and abrasive hissing sounds, the film feels like a lost Soviet classic by someone such as Larisa Shepitko or Alexei German. Its lost-seeming nature suits the work of Shalamov, which was preserved through samizdat, otherwise known as the Russian literary underground.

Yet, like the poet himself, who came up with the strange word as a mantra for his character to stay awake in the forest, audiences must try and fight against the slowness of the film in order to stay invested. Words and sounds are just as important as the images, with the pronounced sound design using far-off sounds, such as reverb-heavy banging evoking prison cells, without drawing too much attention to itself. It reminds us that the authorities, who surveilled Shalamov until the end of his life, were never too far away…

Lovers of classical Russian cinema will find a lot to love here. It’s no surprise that Dmitry Rudakov trained at the Russian State University of Cinematography — home to everyone from Andrei Tarkovsky to Yuri Bykov — which often produces an instantly recognisable “Russian” style. Yet, Dmitry Rudakov’s style comes through strongest when he escapes from these parameters and uses other more interesting techniques. For example, a montage of still images blends together family heritage and surveillance photos — reminding us that that even the most personal moments during the Soviet Union were never far from governmental control.

Rudakov, born after the collapse of the Soviet Union, goes deep into its history, trying to dig at the very paradox of producing poetry in an authoritarian system. In one particularly ambitious moment, Shostakovich’s Jazz Waltz is played at a slowed-down tempo, stretching out an instantly recognisable tune and making it feel strange. This sense of slowness pervades almost every scene, of which there are very few across the film’s 100 minute runtime.

Diversions into romantic territory and spliced-in-documentary footage betray an ambition beyond the initial subject matter, creating an interesting tension between miserablism and tenderness. Can beauty and love exist in such a cruel, often monotonous and depressing place? Sententia doesn’t provide us with any answers, taking a (very) long hard look at Soviet repression and creating a dark and distressing piece of cinema in the process.

Sententia plays as part of the First Feature competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, running from 13th to 29th November

Citizen K

Posted on by victorfraga

M[/dropcap[ikhail Borisovich Khordorkovsky is charming, well-educated, self-confident and highly intelligent. He has suffered imprisonment twice for standing up to Vladimir Putin and his power apparatus in Russia. He runs a platform for genuine (as opposed to state) information about Russia (“Open Russia”). He is a major philanthropist and has the support of leading politicians in the West for his work defending human rights. Yet he is one of the notorious oligarchs. Like many of his kind, he bought up shares in defunct state concerns after the collapse of the Soviet Union, making millions in the process. He was appointed head of Yukos, a hugely successful oil company, which made him the richest man in Russia. He is still worth millions today.

The oligarchs controlled the Russian regime that emerged under Boris Yeltsin. It was the era of gangster capitalism. Much of Russia’s wealth was controlled by criminal gangs. Shootings and murders were common in Russia’s cities. With the collapse of the Russian economy, much of Russia’s population were impoverished and forced to sell prized possessions in the streets just to buy enough food. Boris Yeltsin, although he stood for democracy, was controlled by the oligarchs and had great difficulty in running the country. During this time, Khordorkovsky was suspected of arranging the murder of the Mayor of Nefteyugansk, Vladimir Petukhov, who stood in the way of the expansion of Yukos.

It comes as no surprise, then, that when Vladimir Putin, originally an obscure operative in the KGB, became president and started to challenge the oligarchs, arresting many and taking over their assets, his actions were immensely popular with many Russians. Indeed, Putin used this initiative to lay down the foundations of his control of Russia.

What is so useful about this documentary about the ambiguous figure of Khordokovsky is that it clarifies the reality in Russia. A simplistic Western view of Russia is that Russia is reactionary, backward and likes autocracy and is reverting to form. Putin is anti-liberal, anti-democratic and wants Russia to be “great” again. This is only half true. Putin inherited a situation of gangsterism. What he did was seize control of this gangsterism and use it for his own purposes. Russia was suffering disorder and poverty. He restored “order” and thinks he is building up respect for Russia. The concept of control is the key to understanding Putin. This is well illustrated in this documentary which shows the episode in which the relatives of the sailors of the submarine Kursk, that sank tragically in the Barents Sea, scream at officials for their dishonesty and inaction. One woman, particularly effective in her criticisms, suddenly has a syringe put in her arm and is “calmed down”. She is brought under control. What Putin wants is control.

Anything that threatens that control is dealt with. That was why Russian dissidents are not safe abroad, why the media is ruthlessly supervised, why interference goes on with foreign governments. Putin wants nothing that will call him to account. He wants to mess around with the processes of democratic governments because under their systems he would be called to account. He indulges in dog-whistle politics – rage against “filthy practices” coming in from the West (such as homosexuality), expansion abroad, paranoia about the “persecution” of Russia – because these themes are part of the Russian tradition. It is not that Russia is inherently reactionary. Many of the middle class in Moscow and Saint Petersburg loathe him. It is that many Russians are reactionary, and he wants to establish his base, in the same way that Trump wants to cultivate his base in Mid-America, and Brexiteers want to call up the prejudices and illusions of Middle England to establish their case.

The strange control of Putin is illustrated not just with the chilling events in Salisbury but also with the course of Khordorkovsky’s second trial. At the trial, after being previously convicted for embezzlement of Yukos’s money, in a contradictory way, he is then accused of not paying tax on the money he stole. This was so absurd that Khordorkovsky and his defence team in the court start laughing out aloud and mocking the inept Chief Prosecutor. This was captured on television and has made many Russians sympathetic to Khordorkovsky because it unmasks so well the injustices and pretences of Putin’s regime.

This documentary is a solid and efficient exposé of Putin’s regime. By concentrating on someone who is not entirely guiltless but seems to have been improved by his sufferings, it portrays the contradictions and tragedy of the modern Russian state. It won’t have the general public queuing round the block but catch it if you can. You will learn a lot.

Citizen K is in cinemas on Friday, December 13th.

24 Snow

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

The highs and lows of extreme rural living are expertly depicted in 24 Snow, a documentary that dives into life in one of the most inhospitable places on earth. Alternating scenes of natural beauty with a down-to-earth character portrait of an middle-aged Yakut horse breeder, it celebrates traditional forms of living while lamenting their slow erosion to the forces of modernisation.

Sergey Loukin’s story takes place in the area around Sakkyryr, Russia, one of the coldest inhabited places on earth, where temperatures regularly plummet below minus fifty degrees. It’s so cold in the winter that sheets of ice cling to the horse’s fur and must be removed with axes, and reindeer and husky-pulled sleds remain the only form of transportation. There is no electricity, no internet and no shops for miles around. Sergei must make do with his immediate surroundings alone. We follow him for around a year, from snow to summer to snow again.

There is something very satisfying and empowering even in watching someone dedicate themselves to a simpler, less encumbered way of life. It’s evident that director Mikhail Baryin feels the same way. Stunning cinematography of the Russian Taiga — replete with endless snowy plains, misty mountains and huge lakes — give Sergey’s work a mythical vibe, as if his life is untouched by time itself.

But times are changing, Sergey deliberately framed with his cowboy hat and leather jacket like he’s the last hurrah of the old school. His eldest children have left for the city, earning plenty more than the mere 5,000 roubles (£61.79) he says he earns a month. Sergei knows he could earn more money working elsewhere, but its evident that nothing beats the rush of horse breeding or being so close to nature. He is also often estranged from his family for long periods of time: he says he left his daughter while she was starting to laugh and came back to see her starting to walk.

This is the price he pays for his life, which he accepts with both grace and a touch of regret. He knows he is an outlier, even for the Indigenous Yakut people, yet it is this very extremity that seems to be its own reward. Baryin finds ways to express this in both deeply dramatic ways, such as an epic horse herd crossing a vast river, and the perfectly simple; after cutting grass all day, he lies down and takes a nap, his exhausted expression the very picture of contentment. A likeable, talkative narrator, he warmly invites us into his life, regaling us with anecdotes and minuscule details, expertly communicating the sheer joy he finds in his work.

And there are certain moments that seem to place us right there alongside him. Cinematographer Mikhail Kardashevski rigs his camera on top of racing horses, travelling reindeer and the back of trucks, immersing us in Sergey’s journey across this vast, gorgeous, desolate landscape. Although we probably wouldn’t last a day in Sergey’s winter, rare films like 24 Snow give us the opportunity to imagine, ever-so-briefly, that we could. A truly transportive experience.

24 Snow shows on October 15th as part of the 13th Native Spirit Festival. Just click here for more information.

Cinema that bites!

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

A remarkable hybrid of documentary and fiction tells the story of Laika, the first creature to be set into space by the Soviet Union. Growing up on the streets, the legend goes that she now roams Moscow as a ghost. Blending archival footage with remarkable on-the-ground tracking shots of wild street dogs, it is a bizarre, compelling and controversial tale, likely to provoke discussion for containing one of the most shocking documentary scenes seen all year. The brains behind the story are couple Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter, who also produced the film under their own company RAUMZEITFILM. We sat down with them to discuss morality, Soviet cinema, and working with four-legged protagonists.

Space Dogs has just premiered in the Concorso Cineasti del presente section of the 72nd Locarno Film Festival. You can read our film review here.

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Redmond Bacon – What attracted you to the story of Laika?

Elsa Kremser – We wanted to make a film about a pack of dogs. But we had no idea where. Then we found out that Laika lived on the streets before she was sent to space. We had to go to Moscow.

RB – The narration is by famous Russian actor Aleksey Serebyakov. Why did you pick him as a narrator?

Levin Peter – We knew early on we wanted to have a Russian voice. Only a small part of the film has this narration, but it needed to be Russian because we wanted to create an atmosphere where you can imagine it’s an old scientist reading from his diaries, or a voice from the cosmos! Serebyakov was the first voice that we had in mind when we thought about a Russian voice.

RB – It reminded me of Aleksey Batalov in The Hedgehog in the Fog (Yuri Nortstein, 1975)…

Both Elsa and Levin – Yes!

RB – Discussing other Russian analogues, the subject matter also brought to mind classic Soviet film White Bim, Black Ear (Stanislav Rostotsky, 1977).

LP – Yes we love it.

EK – We watched it to better understand Russia’s relation to dogs. For them it’s a really important film. Every child in Russia has seen this film.

LP – When we watched it we were amazed by how they created a narrative about this dog. In comparison to American products, it’s much less humanising.

EK – And less pushy than something like Beethoven.

LP – If you compare these two movies, the Russian one wins.

RB – White Bim Black Ear is renowned for its unsentimental approach and very distressing scenes. Space Dogs has one scene in particular, which I won’t spoil as the film has only just premiered at Locarno, that is very violent! Did it just happen out of nowhere?

EK – Yes! We followed these dogs for weeks. Sometimes they slept the whole day and sometimes they were biting into cars. One morning this just happened. The entire team was immensely shocked!

RB – It’s interesting from a moral point of view: On the one hand it’s not something you want to see happen, but on the other, it does make for a great scene. As you’d expect, it provoked a few walkouts. How would you justify such a violent scene? How is it necessary in terms of the narrative?

LP – We really believe that there is no need to justify this scene. If you decide to make a film about dogs in the city who live on their own, it would be really stupid to believe that they will act like normal dogs. Of course we never expected this to happen. This was really a turning point in our production. We realised that night that we were working on something that was never shown before and in a way that was never shown before.

RB – It’s extremely well-filmed. How did you keep the camera stabilised for these low shots of the dogs? What equipment did you use?

EK – It took a long time to find the right equipment. Luckily the film is supported by Arri. They gave us all this equipment and helped us to develop this system. We shot with the Alexa Mini Body with a stabilisation system called Wave 2. The stabiliser is built by a little company in Munich [Betz-Tools], and it’s used for shooting on boats. But the beauty of the shots comes from cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer himself, because he had to put all his force into the movie; walking for hours and following dogs, all while keeping the camera steady.

LP – I want to point out the sound too. It’s a really fucked up job for a sound operator.

EK – To get footsteps of dogs!

LP – From the beginning we thought this is going to be a sound movie. From the beginning on we really wanted to hear the tiniest movements and the kind of sounds dogs make.

EK – It was very hard because we could not ask [our team] about any previous experiences. We had to invent everything. How can you arrange a sound recording system for this kind of specific thing? How can you arrange a camera system?

RB – Did you pick all the sounds up on mic, or is there also added foley work?

EK – In Moscow we also made foley recordings with the dogs because every dog has very different footsteps. It was a big collection.

LP – The archive footage was silent. We had to start from scratch.

RB – How did you find the archive footage? Was it all based in Moscow?

LP – It’s all from Moscow. We had brilliant support from Sergei Kackhin. He helped us stay brave enough to wait years for access. One source is the Russian State Archive for Scientific-Technical Documentation. It’s a huge archive where everything that was once invented in the country is stored. Much more interesting is the institute where the dogs are trained. In the basement there were mysterious reels of 35mm footage. Yet from the moment we were told about it to the time we digitised it, three years passed.

RB – How difficult was it to navigate Russian bureaucracy? Was it difficult administratively or was there also political pushback?

LP – It’s a very personal pushback. Of course it’s a huge system. There’s a lot of bureaucracy. But first you have to gain the trust of the person who is directly responsible. It’s interesting because when you enter nothing is possible, which we have also experienced in German archives, where the bureaucratic level stays the same. But in Russia, as soon as they understood our mission and what we wanted to do, they were more open.

EK – But we did struggle with the ongoing tensions between Russia and Europe, especially in the media. There have been scandals that have thrown us back for months. Every time something came up on a big German TV channel, they would say: “OK, no. Now it’s done you cannot come anymore and we don’t give you the material.” Then several months later, we talked again and again, and we made more progress.

RB – Most Western depictions of Russia don’t do much to help these tensions. What I found refreshing about Space Dogs is you don’t otherise Russia at all. There’s a conscious effort to see their treatment of dogs as a universal problem rather than through a stereotypical Anti-Soviet context.

EK – Yes. With the monkey scene [the American government sent the first monkeys into space] you can see that it happened all over. We also thought that these dogs are not Soviet or Russian. They might be inhabitants of these countries at these moments in time but these animals don’t have nations. We never wanted to be too pointed with the Russian angle. We wanted to show it’s a global thing.

RB – The Soviet Space Program has brought untold benefits for mankind, and is a huge achievement, yet for me, watching the way these dogs have been treated, I wondered: was it really worth it? What do you think?

LP – It’s such a difficult question. We still don’t know what will happen in the next 50 years. It would be naive to believe that everything they developed with dogs — such as the rescue systems and bringing living beings back to earth — wouldn’t be possible without these tests. It’s the same moral question when animal testing comes up; in cosmetics or medicine…

EK – But of course there’s the point that with medicine people survive thanks to them. The dog experiments raise the question: why do we want to conquer space so much?

RB – The film also challenges people’s perceptions about dogs. If the film was about rats in space, no one would care.

EK – And there are plenty of rats in space!

RB – Dogs are considered to be man’s best friend. But this film challenges this idea and asks: are dogs naturally domestic or are they actually quite wild and feral? Are you trying to change the way people understand dogs in society?

EK – Of course. We think it’s weird that we always want to be their boss. With the film we turn it around a bit and say it’s not just us controlling them. They have their own world.

LP – The Space Program was also about entertainment. It’s the same in our film, in a way. They are the main heroes. We followed these dogs and of course we gave them names and projected some kind of human behaviour onto them. It will happen with everyone who has seen this film. There is no escape.

RB – Thanks to the low point of view and lengthy shots of the dogs, its a very immersive experience. Are you trying to get people to imagine what it might be like to be one of these animals?

LP – Of course. To raise the question of how I, as a human, might look like from this perspective. From very early on we know that dogs are part of our world, but we know nothing about ourselves as part of their world. We know nothing about the role we play.

EK – What we enjoyed personally from watching our own film is that sometimes you can forget these are dogs. You can feel just like you’re in a movie and the main character is falling in love…

Space Dogs Interview

RB – Moving onto the Moscow setting. The dogs are filmed a lot at dusk, dawn and nighttime. The sky is electric orange and there’s not many people about. Was it your intention to make the city this kind of otherworldly place?

LP – It mostly came out of the situation, because these dogs mostly sleep during the day. At night, when the humans go home, this is their space. During early research there was a moment where we knew we could make this movie. We went to a factory where a pack of dogs were living. We came during the day and they were just sleeping. I thought: “It’s interesting but how can we do a movie with just sleeping dogs?” Then Elsa said: “Let’s try again at six am.” When we went the whole street was full of dogs. One pack was fighting against another…

EK – [interrupting] They were mating! Then we knew we had a movie.

LP – The good thing about the movie is that the more interesting people come out at night too. They really have a connection to the dogs, like the homeless man searching for goods in containers. It’s very obvious that he has his own language with these dogs.

RB – Circling back to the very beginning of the movie. It starts in space, then there’s a very trippy scene depicting Laika re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) homage?

EK: Of course. Especially in the sound design, we had a lot of inspiration.

RB – The music too; it sounds very cool.

LP– When we were finishing the music with composer John Gürther, we watched this 20 minutes of tripping in Space Odyssey again; just to check once again how it works on the audio layer.

EK – For music and sound development we watched hundreds of space films. Especially 70s.

LP – We liked The Andromeda Strain (Robert Wise, 1971). This was really the direction we wanted to go in.

RB – You’re currently working on a fiction feature set in Minsk, Belarus [The Green Parrot, telling the story of a 34 year-old autopsy assistant who falls in love with a 17-year-old woman, is currently in development]. What draws you to the Russian speaking world?

EK – The reason our next film is set in Minsk is a bit of a coincidence. It was not an intellectual choice, like: “We want to go to Minsk to tell a story about a guy in a morgue falling in love.” Coincidentally we fell in love with this area of the world.

LP – We grandfather taught Russian his whole life. There were Russian friends visiting my family once a year. We started to explore this world together from the first moment on. But it was never a choice to say: “We dedicate our lives to this.”

EK – It somehow happened.

Picture at the top: Locarno Film Festival, Marco Abram. The other images are from the film

Extinction (Extinção)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Conversations. In Russian. At border checkpoints between countries in the former Soviet Union. And at places in between. Monuments, striking architecture. Much less arresting locations, too. Some of these conversations are accompanied by black and white footage. Very occasionally, someone’s lips move and you see and hear them speaking at the same time, but most of the time, you don’t. Other conversations are accompanied by blank, dark blue footage, nothing but the uniform colour on the screen (unless you count the white, English language subtitles), just people talking on the soundtrack. Monologues discussing various aspects of modern, Russian history and the ethnic diversity of the countries bordering it also appear on the soundtrack along with unsettling music ranging from avantgarde orchestral to drone.

Kolja comes from Transnistria, formerly part of the Moldavian Socialist Soviet Republic (now a self-proclaimed republic, not recognised by any other countries). He has a passport, so he’s travelling, the interpreter on a film crew making a film about Russia and borders and ethnicity. It might be this film or it might be a film we never see. For much of the time we see him driving to or from Eastern Bloc border checkpoints or being questioned by officials in rooms about his nationality and loyalty. Although it clearly has its own identity, with which he identifies, Transnistria doesn’t appear to be recognised by any other country.

As Kolja crosses over and waits in between a seemingly endless series of borders between one country and another – actually five in number – the very idea of nationality, of separate nation states, seems to diminish in significance to the point of evaporation into thin air. Although when at one point he dismisses the suggestion that he might want to live in the EU, you can see him complying with the idea of borders inside his head. A citizen of nowhere? A citizen of somewhere?

In places shots are held for some considerable length of time, whether it’s the opening shot of Kolja’s face against a background of white walls in a waiting room somewhere as we hear him questioned at length by border official on the soundtrack or a passenger seat shot of him driving through nondescript territory.

Much of the time, nothing really happens. It’s a lot like the effect of 2001, watching someone perform mundane tasks or, more often here, wait around for officials to perform their functions so the people in question can move on. As I wrote of Kubrick’s SF outing on its recent reissue, there’s something quite hypnotic about the mundane. If anything, that effect is even stronger here – the vivid black and white images lend an almost dreamlike quality to the whole thing and there are no dramas to suddenly leap out of the humdrum.

It’s barely even a narrative, more like a very strange and empty yet somehow unforgettable surreality, memorable as much for the places in which events (don’t) occur as it is for the things people say and the ideas that float around within their words. At their most focused and extreme, the content of those words explore incidences of genocide under Stalin.

Anyone looking for cinematic equivalents might recognise the feeling of the languorous waking dream from Tarkovsky narratives (Ivan’s Childhood/1962, Stalker/1979) or the bleak architectural images and mom-synchronised voice over of early, pre-feature film Cronenberg (Stereo/1969, Crimes Of The Future/1970). But again, both these examples look positively action-packed by comparison with Extinction – a film which might, just might, be destined for cult status.

Nation states seemingly have mechanisms to exert control over people, but in the end that really doesn’t matter in vision of the female Portuguese filmmaker Salomé Lamas: no matter how much states try to confine those who reside in or pass through them, people and their words, thoughts and consciousness potentially transcend all that.

Extinction is out in the UK on Friday, July 20th. Watch the film trailer below: