On the side of the road

Documentary filmmaker Andrey Zaitsev made his debut in feature films

On May 27, the premiere of Andrei Zaitsev’s short film took place at the Central House of Writers. This half-hour film is an artistic reconstruction of the circumstances of the tragedy that happened exactly four years ago, on May 27, 2002, on the 32nd kilometer of the Kyiv highway, where unknown people erected a homemade poster with the inscription “Death to the Jews.” In one of the cars driving along the highway on this summer day, a woman with a child was returning from the dacha. She stopped, got out of her small car and tried to pull the banner out of the ground. At that moment, an explosive device went off.

Andrey Zaitsev gained fame as a documentary director. His first film, My House, was filmed from the window of his own home. For a whole year, Zaitsev rented one corner of the yard, where the residents of this microdistrict simply drank, walked, sat, and , in general, relaxed. The result was a rather gloomy picture in which the public and the intimate swapped places.

The second film - "Gleb" - was also the result of a careful examination of nature. This time the object was a little boy, his first day in kindergarten, that is, the first experience of socialization experienced by a very domestic and much loved child.

For his third film, Andrei Zaitsev chose a completely different way of presenting the material. This is a feature film, rigidly and deliberately structured “to fit the concept.”

The film begins with a man’s hands cutting cardboard, whittling a stick... We don’t see who makes the poster, but we are shown what a specific and very simple task it is: someone wasn’t lazy, spent time, effort, came up with an idea , how to adjust the explosive mechanism... The contrast between our knowledge of what happened as a result and the completely ordinary work on the screen is one of the most powerful impressions of the film. Then we see cars driving along a busy country highway, speeding past the side of the road with a poster. The film takes us inside cars where people are sitting, these are ordinary retired gardeners, or parents with children, or married couples, or youth groups, or police officers. Each of these people has their own concerns, their own conversations, many notice the poster and react to it in their own way - indignantly, indifferently, enthusiastically, irritably. And only one, an ordinary, tired woman, driving her Oka, in which in the back seat a grandmother is feeding a boy with water from a bottle, suddenly stops...

Andrei Zaitsev says that he was not interested in the fate of this particular woman, he did not follow her, and does not mention her name (we will call her Tatyana Sapunova). He was interested in those who passed by. They are the heroes of this short film, and the audience can easily relate their own actions to them.

And the point is not at all that some motorists explain to their child that, in general, “Jews are good people,” while others joyfully begin chanting an openly xenophobic chant. No one really supports the authors of the poster, most are indignant, but everyone drives by without even having time to realize what actually happened to them at that moment, what choice they made.

The film seems to be a social gesture; it is accompanied by the action-exhibition “Violence”, at which the project organizers from “Kinoteatra.doc” presented photographs with nationalist inscriptions collected from all over the country. But in fact, despite the straightforwardness of the design, the “Poster” is not at all limited by its protest position. This film can be seen in another way - in any case, the image of the road along which, in the general flow, but separated each by our own small box of personal space, we all rush past something important - this image remains imprinted in the mind.

Alena Solntseva