Cinema Of The Era Of Change

Following the sombre war drama Anna's War, Aleksey Fedorchenko embraces his lighter side, turning the camera on his personal history to create an enjoyable confection of a documentary about the decline of the Sverdlovsk Film Studio.

If all that sounds so hyper-local to hold little appeal, fear not, because you need no former knowledge of the regional Sverdlovsk Studio, which came close to bankruptcy in 1998,  to enjoy what essentially amounts to a romp through the ins and outs of the film industry in Nineties Russia - complete with gangsters. Fedorchenko sets the tone from the start, as intertitles reveal we are about to see everything from "smoking" and "alcohol" through to "wild sex" and "space evil" - each pledge accompanied by increasingly amusing "Minstry of health" warnings on the subjects. We are also told "bad words" will be "barked out in compliance with censoring".

This playfulness also extends to stop-motion animated sequences that appear throughout and the sound design, more generally, which majors in "record scratch" double takes as the story progresses. There's also a wealth of clips from Sverdlovsk-made films - that might well have you trawling YouTube afterwards - and a running joke in which items are identified, from a palm tree and books to people in films or the studio's history, and later indicated by arrows marked "that very palm tree/book... etc".

Most of what used to be the Sverdlovsk Studio is now a high end shopping centre adding an extra level of absurdity as Fedorchenko interviews many of the great and the good who once worked there among what are now clothes shops. The affluence is in sharp contrast to talk of going "half a year without a salary" or failed attempts to make a profit by buying a train full of gasoline. There's also a broader sense of the desire for commerce overtaking that for culture across the decade.

The writer/director is an engaging presence and a natural raconteur, whether he's describing the studio's "room of requirement", a hole in the roof or that time a mafia guy gave him a bottle of wine that he was "sure was poisoned", not that that stopped him giving it to the concierge on the way out. Fedorchenko's deliberately sketchy approach marries perfectly to what emerges as a sketchy situation from which, against all odds, many films saw the light of day and offers an enjoyable, deliberately tongue-in-cheek, perspective on the Russia of the period.