Translated material
Yuri Mamin about the “foreign agency”: “I’m not surprised, I accept it with pleasure”
On April 24, the Russian Ministry of Justice declared film director Yuri Mamin, author of the famous films “Fountain”, “Feast of Neptune”, “Window to Paris”, a so-called foreign agent .
Along with Yuri Mamin, the Ministry of Justice list, published, as usual, on Friday, also included screenwriter Yuri Teplyakov, Natalya Gogoleva (Kasimova), the Anti-Imperial Bloc of Peoples project and the literary publication Words Beyond Myself.
According to the Ministry of Justice, Mamin and Teplyakov disseminated false information about the decisions of the Russian authorities and their policies, and also opposed the war with Ukraine. In addition, the Ministry of Justice believes that Mamin spread fakes about the decisions of the Russian authorities, opposed the SVO, “participated in the creation and distribution of materials by foreign agents, spoke on information platforms provided by foreign agents and foreign media.”
Sever.Realii talked to the director about what articles of the Criminal Code his films would fall under in today’s Russia if Mom had filmed them today. And also about how he took the news from the Ministry of Justice.
Theater and film director, screenwriter, actor, composer, TV presenter, Honored Artist of the Russian Federation Yuri Mamin was born on May 8, 1946 in Leningrad, in 1969 he graduated from the directing department of the Faculty of Dramatic Art of LGITMiK, worked at Lenconcert and at the Lenfilm film studio. In 1982 he graduated from the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors (workshop of Eldar Ryazanov). The first film directed by Yuri Mamin, “Neptune's Holiday” (1986), brought him fame. Since 1995, Mamin has worked on television, was the author and presenter of the programs “From forte to drunk ...”, “Chameleon”, “Observatory”, in the early 2000s he created the series “Russian Horror Stories”, from 2009 to 2012 he hosted the program “House of Culture” on channel 100TV. The most famous films of Yuri Mamin were the films “Sideburns” (1990) and “Window to Paris” (1993). In 2019, the director left for the United States - as he explained, not seeing any prospects for himself in Russia “due to his unwillingness to serve the interests of the authorities.”
“They have nothing to pinch me from”
Yuri Mamin now lives in New York. He says that the news from the Russian Ministry of Justice did not surprise him and did not upset him at all.
– What does that matter to me, exactly? It’s more difficult for journalists; they are still connected with the Russian audience. And I only have my YouTube channel, my program "Yuri Mamin's House of Culture" , it is not even monetized: since it is educational, I am allowed to use any other people's content, but I do not have the right to earn money. Yes, in Russia educational activities for foreign agents are prohibited, but I work for the global Russian-speaking audience and do not depend on the Russian authorities. I have no real estate left, no savings in Russia - it’s impossible to grab me for that, that is, they have nothing to pinch from me.
The only thing that surprises the director is why the Ministry of Justice didn’t put him on its list earlier.
– I left in 2019 and, by the way, I left with the words that I hate Putin’s empire, and that it has become impossible to breathe in Russia. This should have been enough for them. Moreover, I have always said that I am against “SVO”. I think this is a crime. I had a video about Mariupol, which everyone watched and cried. I made it with my own music and edited real footage. He is so painful - he went out of business at the beginning of the war. I think this clip was enough.
The director says that he has never hidden the fact that he thinks about Putin personally.
– For example, I said that I have a proposal - to free the animals from the St. Petersburg zoo, with whom I really sympathize, and put Putin and his clique in these cages - instead of the Hague court, in which I do not believe. Let people walk, look at them, see these monsters and learn from their mistakes. These statements of mine are circulating on the Internet, on social networks, they are sent to each other, I have read them myself. So, they could have put me on their lists a long time ago. But maybe they decided to give me such a gift, since I’ll be turning 80 very soon, in two weeks.
– Still, the author of “Window on Paris” is a foreign agent – it somehow doesn’t fit in my head...
– Is it okay when Mendelssohn was banned? Everyone plays weddings to his wedding march, but the author cannot be named - folk music. This was the case in Hitler's Germany. And books were burned - as Mikhail Romm told us, this is “ordinary fascism.” It is repeated, now in the form of “racism,” which is absolutely a type of fascism.
– From your own experience, you can compare what is happening in Russia today with late Soviet times. What's the difference?
– In late Soviet times there was such an indifferent censorship through which you could crawl through, break through, you could still somehow talk with these people. And today, under this regime... Pushkin said about Nikolai that he “produced so many fools that there are enough for our great-grandchildren.” And today we see the same thing under Putin in his entourage - a horde of cynics or fools who can only repeat primitive propaganda slogans. And if we talk about the ordinary population, which we hear in telephone conversations between fighters and their families, this is generally some kind of rock bottom, this is something terrible.
– Can the country climb out of this bottom in the foreseeable future?
- No. First of all, due to the fact that there will be no one to fix it. The youth of today in Russia are too scared and too prone to conformism. Navalny said - give me 10 years, I will fix Russia. I think he is an absolute romantic. Or a projector, or a technocrat who believed that some new laws could change all this. But you changed the laws, but this does not correct people who have lost all ideas about morality. They may be obedient, but they do not have this categorical imperative, which forces a person not to steal, not to kill, not because someone is looking at him, but because it is contrary to his conscience, his honor, if a person is raised that way. As Ranevskaya said, “I still saw decent people.” I still saw them.
– In spite of everything, do you feel sorry for Russia today?
- It's a pity. But what to do? I feel sorry for both ancient Greece and ancient Egypt. And I feel sorry for Russia - but the people turned out to be unable to resist the authorities and propaganda. The trouble is that Putin and his team have very well learned the experience of the last Russian tsars and the last Soviet rulers who lost power. They burn out any danger to themselves at the very beginning, extinguish any protest. Therefore, my only hope may be that Ukraine will give Russia a hard time. Only then can something change. And not very immediately.
Mamin, however, says that he remembers how Russia could have been different - in the thawed 60s.
“Then there was a belief that, in fact, we were building a fair society, but we took a wrong turn, did not follow Lenin’s path. And this faith allowed people to create some bright works. There will be no such theaters as then: the theater of Tovstonogov, Efros, Efremov, Zakharov. The best films were made then. Gradually in the 70s they began to destroy all this, they gave both Danelia and Ryazanov a hat, they fought against this censorship wall for years. And we fought, Leikin (poet, screenwriter - SR) and I closed almost every performance that we wrote for the student theater. Both at Lenconcert and everywhere else, the artistic councils checked everything, fools and conformists cut out all the boldest things. At Lenfilm, the directors took it very hard. They either drank themselves to death or suffered strokes. It all happened before my eyes. But now everything is even worse - total surveillance of everything and everyone, this has never happened before, they have reached a new level.
Mamin says that today his famous film “Feast of Neptune” would simply not have a single chance to pass censorship. And the director would be accused of discrediting everything and everyone.
“I threw all the ideals off the pedestal there, parodied Alexander Nevsky, the communists, and the heroes from Vorskla, and all this against the backdrop of epic buildings, the Izborsk fortress.
But then it didn’t offend anyone’s feelings, says Mamin.
“I traveled around Siberia with this film, the director of the cinema said to me: “Look what you did to the auditorium.” I looked, there were people sliding out of their chairs, gasping, tears flowing. And on New Year’s Eve 1987, since it was forbidden to sell vodka, in Leningrad, in all cinemas on Nevsky, “Neptune’s Holiday” was shown non-stop, endlessly and free of charge. And Lyudmila (my wife - SR) and I walked all night along Nevsky, went into every cinema, and everywhere people laughed. We were happy and proud. I have never seen anything like this and probably never will. After the film, people stayed in the hall almost until the metro closed, talking first about the film, then about the country, about the future. It seemed to me that the country was changing, the people were gaining maturity. But now I understand that I was wrong.
He is trying to understand why all this happened to the country.
– In the 90s it seemed to us that this was freedom. But people began to pray for the money. Everyone stole from each other, but my administration stole the proceeds from my films. “Window to Paris” is such a popular film that would have brought millions to others, but nothing to me, because everything was stolen. By the way, the film could have a sequel. The idea of the film "Window to Paris. 20 years later" was approved at Lenfilm, but Medinsky, who hated my first film, came specially for the pitching. The plot was this: a disinterested teacher now works in a boarding school for orphans. The matured students, who themselves had gone abroad, returned, came to his house and said: “The window is opening, comrade teacher. We want to use it, sell fuel oil to France.” He resists, but they threaten that a brick will fall on him. He runs away to Paris - and there you will no longer hear French speech. Paris ceases to be a cultural Mecca for him. He returns, Zhirinovsky takes away their boarding house from his students, and then he goes with them to Siberia - to build a city of happiness from wood, a new Paris. But the pitching script did not go through. And not only Medinsky, but also Nikita Mikhalkov played a role there.
– How do you, by the way, look at the scandal that has now erupted due to the fact that Mikhalkov invited Sokurov to the International Moscow Film Festival to present him with the prize “For Contribution to World Cinema”? And then the award ceremony was suddenly cancelled.
– To be honest, I’m surprised why Sokurov was so sad. I would consider it an honor if they refused to give me a prize at this Putin holiday. I myself once refused the State Prize, by the way, because they didn’t want to show my film “The Fountain” at the box office. But I accept the title of foreign agent, and, so to speak, with pleasure.
Yuri Mamin about his “foreign agency”: “I’m not surprised and accept it with pleasure”