Alexey Fedorchenko: "The state needs optimists with bad memory"

The triumph of film festivals - about the "culture of refusal", the inefficiency of art and the inability to make cinema in the current circumstances

One of the most interesting directors, which goes on their own bizarre, reconstructor of mythology, space flights and historical tragedies - about a nightmare, in which the world was today. Is it worth it to make a movie in this frost?

- For more than a month we live in an altered space, where it is even prohibited to call what is happening with our proper names. In the altered space, other air, or rather its absence, and consciousness is altered. What is happening to you now, with a profession?

- Well, about the profession, to be honest, I don’t think yet. Everything that happened crossed out the motivation to work, to live. I'm trying to find some meanings to continue to exist. It seems to me to talk about the art of talking early and impossible to formulate something accurately. When the heart hurts, the head is difficult and plans in ruins. Now I had to shoot a large picture, planned shooting in Kharkov, then in Kyiv, in the Zhytomyr region. We decided to make a film about the outstanding Russian philosopher Mitrofan Aksenov, who lived in Ukraine, he formulated the original theory of time.

- Time as the fourth dimension.

- Yes, for 15 years he anticipated the opening of Minkovsky - Einstein! At the same time, nothing is known about Aksenov. On Wikipedia there are signs of the question: where he was born, what he did, how he died, where. It is treated as a myth, although the books remained. We wanted to return a person to a cultural, scientific field out of oblivion. Return the name as a world treasure. And we have collected his biography by bit.

- In general, you yourself ended up in a trap of the destroyed time.

- And it is not clear when this ... Operation on the open heart of the country. How many more deaths will be. We planned another film - in Greece, the third - in Colombia. And the point is not only in the physical impossibility of filming-I already treat these scripts differently. Something managed to predict, but the main meanings are turned 180 degrees. I don’t know how to approach this.

-Your recent film “The Last“ Cute Bulgaria ”is a pier, collected from fragments of a Soviet country. Shards, as it turned out, are able to grow together.

-We tried to say about the danger of Stalinism with a direct text, but for some reason no one saw this in the film. Remember, there was a cartoon - the dance of members of the Politburo, Stalin and ... Moscow, which devours everything. Not a single film critic noticed this, they talked about others, about a cinema language.

At first, the “special operation” closed all possible vectors of existence - our author’s cinema had an audience, God forbid, one percent ...

And now the world cultural public has connected. They tell us: it doesn’t matter what you want to say, it is important which nation you belong to. But this is the same Nazism.

- While the tragedy in Ukraine continues to unfold, the topic of the boycott of Russian culture will gain momentum. The Ukrainian director with world fame Sergey Loznitsa was her victim. After his exclusion from the Ukrainian Academy for Cosmopolitanism, he made a statement in which he says how dangerous to rely on “national identity” in decision -making, “use the Stalinist interpretation of cosmopolitanism, based on hatred, denying freedom of speech, protecting collective guilt and prohibiting any manifestations of individualism”. But today, European institutions cancel the individual choice of the artist, his civic position.

- So far, some want to cancel all the autonomous Ukrainian, others - they cancel everything Russian, painting over the brown all the people. The world joins this flash mob. Now I almost receive letters from festivals and film academies daily, they seem to be written under a carbon copy. It is clear the desire of people to support Ukraine, support. Why should we delete our films? If I could save Ukraine (or at least one person) at the cost of my films, I would immediately burn them all, would never return to this activity.

They boycott my picture about artists genocide in Stalin's times and at the same time purchase oil and gas from Russia. This is a vile position.

I understand that I have some kind of offense all the time, now it is unforgivable. But it seems to me that Ukrainians allowed today are not allowed to participants in this world flash mob. As if Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, Tarkovsky, Sinyavsky with Daniel were boycotted in Soviet times. In Europe, they begin to fight with the most active fighters with the regime: with those who left, with those who even “under the lid” are trying to do something. Shame is the blockade of the Paralympians, a blow to the entire Olympic movement, designed to fight against war in principle. And then people who defeated their ailment were sent back for the wrong nation. Therefore, the feeling that we were betrayed: both the government and the whole world.

- Can CANCEL RUSSIAN CULTURA in Europe turn into a culture? The abolition of "Great Russians of Pushkin", "the father of Russian nationalism of Dostoevsky"?

- Ukrainians now have the right to do so, they look at us through a bloody veil. If we are talking about Europe and America, then it looks like a simultaneous action. The most accurate word is “flash mob”. I tried not to interfere in the disputes, but I once froze with some kind of "cultural" Israeli. I say: “What are you, boy, who are you? Let's call on the pogroms! ”

- Recently I observed a discussion in a closed group of documentaryists. It turned out that the directors who made a protest cinema on the knees ended up in West. Now one of them is offered by Western distributors in the credits that the film is Georgian. Then he will have a future. The same with animators, including those who, after protests and detentions, were forced to leave. They try to try on guilt ... They are chips that fly from a burning forest.

- Yes, the forest is chopped, chips fly. I am very worried about those who had to leave. I know how many live now, what kind of humiliation they get. Not even because of oppression. It’s just that there are more than one million refugee Ukrainians who are saved by the whole world, but it is obvious that the appearance of extra mouths begins to irritate over time, and soon they will become a second-grade for many. And ours there are people of the third grade, because the work, which is already not there, will get first to their citizens, then Ukrainian refugees, then ours. And it will be necessary to either run further into the unknown, or return, because it will not work to live there.

- Whether it will be possible to live here, also a big question.

- Forecasts no longer work, we live in time with many unknowns. This is scary, especially for those who have children.

-How can you develop some kind of agenda that would stop a humanitarian catastrophe? What can we do?

- Trying to force myself to return to work. We are preparing to launch the debut film film of the beautiful animator Svetlana Filippova about family relations. What else ... started repairs. I put it off for a long time, but

When everything collapses and I want to run - you need to do repairs.

- You yourself always have a lot of projects, do you want to shoot a movie now or can you?

- You see, I have a duty to Mitrofan Aksenov, whom I discovered, and it seems to me that I just have to return it ...

-Do you think that in the world of total disaster will be in demand by someone transcendental-kinetic theory of Aksenov time?

-Well, the world is still in demand by McDonald's, Pepsi-Cola and Solovyov. But we will not spend our time on all this. There were literally units, ready to engage in semantic things. Read, listen to music, explore.

- I thought everything was in order to arouse humanity in people, rejection of the world of violence. Although faith in the saving mission of art is destroyed.

- A few years ago, I formulated that Russia should have only three national programs: water - conservation, forests - revival, people are enlightenment. All other vectors of the country's development follow from these three theses.

There was a failure in the education, instead of it we received sophisticated historical distortions, substitutions.

- Today, all events are developing in accordance with the cultural reboot, compiled in zero by state -sized, led by the then Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky. This is the concept of the “special path” of the Russian “state-civation state” with the motto “Time, back!”, With the transformation of a citizen into a loyal state.

- In the “last“ sweet Bulgaria ”, Chekist Adalat says:“ The state needs optimists with bad memory. ” The bombing begins when the enlightenment ends.

- Maybe the true reality causing such suffering means the end of civilization?

- Now such thoughts come to mind to many. And it seems that there is no time for culture. I think, on the contrary. If she had not been in the tenth plan with us all these years, this would not have happened.

- Even in troubled times, we should talk about culture, not to postpone?

- And then there is nowhere to postpone. Frontier is in full swing.

- To the topic of education ... Tell us about your book collection.

- I am collecting a library of repressed scientists. I collect the books and stories of these people, I write a book.

- At what stage is the work on your new game paintings?

-Recently, the shooting of the film “Big Snakes of Ulli-Kale”, not just about the relations of Russia and the Caucasus, but about the country's colonial ideology were completed. And now the picture is read in a completely different way. The next film, which we launched a week before February 24, is called the Housing City. He is about how people get out of themselves fascism. In August, we had to go to Colombia to shoot. This is the third film from the cycle of the mockmentation: “The first on the moon”, “Big snakes of Ulli-Kale” and “Raccoon City”-I wanted to make such a trilogy.

-In your “first on the moon”, the enkavedeshniki in 1938 launched a rocket into the space, and Kharlamov Vornok took the astronaut from a love date and drove at the cosmodrome. Relevant. You can expect anything from you.

- Now I don't know what to wait. And from myself and from my country. And from what is happening in the world. All creative and production issues have gone to the hundredth plan. I think that my sister is in burning Sumy ...

- Trying to take her out?

- I can't find it yet. And in Kyiv there are many relatives, even more - Kremenchug, Poltava region. This overshadows all these boycotts and cinema.

- What to do, what to rely on?

- I always reassured myself with the phrase of Schweik: "It never happened that it was not there." Somehow it will, we will live if the worst does not happen. God forbid to agree. It doesn’t matter to me at all what conditions there, if only they stopped killing. By and large, all these borders were created for safety - not for death. They will disappear anyway over time ...

- Well, or they will disappear, or humanity.

“I don’t know what to hope for.” Only to stop blood. Any patient - whether a person, is a society - must first provide an ambulance. I hope people will come to their senses. And now they are stupefied with the smell of blood, go crazy, kill. What a movie is there.