Static, Tragic and Narrow: What’s To Be Done About Russian Documentary?

In 2010, filmmaker Olga Stefanova left her Moscow apartment to spend a year at Russia’s Bellingshausen polar station documenting the lives of 15 men who live there.

Thousands of miles away, Yulia Panasenko knocked on the door of her neighbor who was suffering from cancer that transformed her from a chic Russian woman to a skeleton clothed in yellowish skin. Panasenko let the camera run defiantly on.

The results of these persistent preoccupations—Stefanova’s “The Wintering” and Panasenko’s “Outro”—were part of the 12th annual Flahertiana Documentary FestivalOctober 11-17 in the Russian city of Perm, where the two films participated in the international competition with 15 non-Russian documentaries.

Festival president Pavel Petchenkin has mixed feelings about films like these. While they’re heartfelt projects, they illustrate one element of the troubling situation currently faced by contemporary Russian documentary.

“Men see that it is not possible to make a career in Russian documentary as it is today,” he says. “So they seek out other sectors. Then we see a few directors, mostly young women working in documentary with virtually no budget. They buy a cheap camera and invest all their time in their projects.

“It causes a certain type of film that makes the span of Russian documentary pretty narrow.”

Occasionally, there were experimental and internationally oriented films, such as Sergey Lintsov’s “Factories of Imagination,” about the international trend to transform abandoned factories into cultural centers. However, many of the Russian docs that screened at Flahertiana were often technically flawed films created with nearly obsolete equipment. Topics included the cancer-suffering woman, abandoned children and a grief study: Tragic human destinies, brutally portrayed as only Russians can do them.