I spoke yesterday with Alexei Popogrebsky about his Berlinale title How I Ended This Summer for a story which will appear later this month on TOL.
I asked Popogrebsky about the tendency among Western audiences to try to find political meaning in Russian film when there is none. Here’s what he said:
“The maximum of interest toward Soviet and Russian cinema was late ’80s and early ’90s. A lot of films, especially those screened in Berlin, were films that were unearthed or uncovered because they were banned because there were implications in them that were not desirable for the political leadership at that time. So I think maybe in a way film scholars and film-going audiences became a little bit conditioned to expect something, a hidden agenda in Russian films. That’s something we look for in films from Iran or, I don’t know, Turkey or any other country that has an alleged problem with free speech. So that Russian having a negative image in that regard, I think it also stimulates this search for hidden agenda. With some films, that should be more relevant than maybe with How I Ended This Summer.”
The TOL story will be out in a couple weeks. In the meantime, please read this Moscow Times interview, in which the director talks about polar bears and filming in Chukotka.
