Russia’s cinema industry has entered 2016 encumbered with an unprecedented variety of instruments of censorship. When I was a student at the prestigious All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), lecturers used to tell us about the difficulties faced by directors in the Soviet years. The impossibility of showing one’s films at international festivals or having them appear on general release; the screenplays gathering dust in drawers for decades.
Soviet directors learned how to use gentle satire to criticise the system — the work of Eldar Ryazanov is a prime example. Ryazanov’s 1975 comedy The Irony of Fate about a Moscow doctor who winds up in Leningrad on a New Year’s Eve bender without realising his mistake (the apartment buildings and their interiors are all identical, such is the logic of the planned economy) has become a national institution. It’s still shown on TV every year. Ryazanov’s death in November 2015, at the age of 88, marked the end of an era.
Nowadays, I thought, we can talk openly about anything, and the possible only barrier between me and my audience in our new capitalist reality is a lack of money
