“Are we not the people?”

Director Pavel Lungin - about the sensational performance of Konstantin Raikin

Needless to say, I support Raikin's speech.

We all felt his true pain.

In ancient Japan, a samurai, in order to express disagreement with the actions of the ruler, went to his palace and committed seppuku, public ritual suicide.

There was a suicidal sincerity in Raikin's words. Let's respect her.

For me, the main mission of an artist is to feel the unspoken pain of his people. React to emerging conflicts.

We are like doctors who inoculated themselves with the plague to cure the disease.

You can accuse these doctors of lack of patriotism or lack of faith in the Ministry of Health. But to deprive an artist of this ability to feel pain means to castrate him, to make his life meaningless.

None of my films have been censored.

We don't have direct censorship right now. In our time, Nicholas the First does not read Pushkin's poems and does not personally black out.

But it turned out that censorship is carried out from below by "initiative groups" and poorly educated people. Censorship is, as it were, delegated to them.

They are now deciding whether we need Wagner, they are breaking sculptures, they are pouring green paint over the children who came to the historical competition. They became the voice of the people

The police are inactive, and the authorities do not evaluate the rioters. What are we, not a people?

I'm afraid if my "Island" came out now, there would be many offended guardians and furious zealots: the hero does not pray like that, he stands with his back to the church. It is not standard, not correct. The film would not have been released, would that have been better? Especially the "King", who says - oh horror! - about how Ivan the Terrible killed the Holy Metropolitan Philip. It’s easier to smash than to open the “Lives of the Saints” and read Philip’s accusatory speech in the Assumption Cathedral, with which he calls on the Tsar, “stained with the blood of the innocent,” to come to his senses. We are all so different. Raikin, Tabakov, Zvyagintsev, I. We state that something disturbing and wrong is happening in our society. The artist feels in danger.

The very process of creativity becomes suspicious.

Heed our words.

Pavel Lungin