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 | NOT NEW RUSSIANS | World Premiere |
Crew: | Producers: Abigail Spindel | Email: | videosfera.art gmail.com |
synopsis Dark scenes from Russia in 2004, that reveal the anger and despair of ordinary Russians who feel abandoned by the state infrastructure: Old pensioners cling to one of the last communal apartments in the center of St. Petersburg. Friends and family make sense of the death of a poisoned man outside of St. Petersburg. A parent, mourning the loss of a son killed in Chechnya, confronts a military representative north of the Arctic Circle. A young gay man drinks himself to oblivion in an apartment in St. Petersburg.
director Abigail Spindel \is a documentary filmmaker based in São Paulo, Brazil. The great-granddaughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, she was raised in Newton, Massachusetts on a steady diet of Russian music and literature, and studied Russian at Williams College. She lived for two years in Russia, first as a student in Moscow then on a documentary photography grant in St. Petersburg. This was the first material she shot in video.
filmmaker's note This video was made with the aim of immersing the viewer in the bewilderment and frustration of Russians who had the ground shift under their feet and never got their footing back; for whom capitalist values and behaviours are as impenetrable, if not more so, than the old Soviet structures.
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