Kirill Serebrennikov was not allowed to leave Russia for the premiere of his new film Petrov’s Fluc, last summer in Cannes. But otherwise he is free, the 52-year-old stage director and filmmaker stated, at the time by telephone from Moscow. ‘Yes, I was even free when I was under house arrest. Freedom is not determined by the circumstances around you, but by what is going on in your brain. I pushed myself to be free. That will cost you some strength: being free is hard work. It wasn’t like: ha, let’s get some rest at home.’
He was not allowed to leave his home for 20 months: the Russian state had filed a lawsuit against Serebrennikov, who was accused of embezzling money from his position as artistic director of the Gogol Center in Moscow. A completely unfounded accusation, according to critics at home and abroad: exemplary of the urge of the Russian government to enslave the (too) liberal or critical cultural sector.
Serenrennikov was also prohibited from using telephone and internet from home. Yet he always continued to work on various stage performances and films; Directions and script versions were brought out via a stick.
The director was arrested in 2017 while shooting leto, his musical feature film about Leningrad’s eighties punk scene, for which he was forced to control the final scenes from a distance. That film was also selected for the main competition of the Cannes film festival. Petrov’s Fluc, which can be seen in Dutch cinemas from this week, he directed right after his release. The movie, after the novel The Petrovs In and Around the Flu by Aleksey Salnikov (2016), follows the hellish New Year’s Eve of Petrov, a pale-skinned cartoonist from a grimly portrayed Yekaterinburg. Delusion and reality become completely confused in what begins as a flu epidemic: Petrov’s son develops a high fever.
There is impressive coughing in Petrov’s Fluc†
“All played before the pandemic. I think a kind of prophetic power is characteristic of Russian literature. Alexei Salnikov possesses that power, but it is also something that connects Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov. And I can’t deny it: the pandemic is offering a new perspective on Petrov’s Fluc†
You have said that your film is about fears. Can you specify those fears?
‘The fear of losing a son, or one’s own life, fear of violence, the fear of not existing, the fear of being abandoned…there are so many, those fears. Each of us knows them. How do we survive in the surreal reality around us? How do you find your own way out, to another dimension, the right door? That’s all in Petrov’s Fluc†
What was it like not being able to attend your own premiere?
‘Oh, that actually feels a lot like today’s world: you are physically distant, but somehow still virtually present. In the meantime, I’m just busy shooting my next film. My team, the same people I worked with Petrov’s Fluc, laid out a red carpet where we are spinning today. So we just walked over it, filming ourselves and video calling friends who are in Cannes at the same time and walking the red carpet there at the same time. Pretty unreal, but not uninteresting as a spectacle.’
Was it emotional too?
“Ah, you know, I’m a workhorse. Work, work, work: that’s it for me. Opening nights are the most difficult moments in my life, be it theater or film. I just can’t get used to that lost feeling. I want to run away and hide in a corner somewhere. Possibly this form, in which I was not quite there, was for me a healthier variation on a premiere.’
During the day you stood trial, in the evening and at night you wrote this film. Is that sustainable?
“I knew I had to endure it, to break free from this goddamn hell. So I decided to see it as an adventure. The movie became the most important to me, the rest didn’t. How I wanted to shoot a certain scene, where I was going to position the camera, which could be a visual equivalent of Salnikov’s fascinating and fantastical prose. That’s what I said to the producer, a friend of mine: I want to deal with Salnikov, not Kafka.
‘As a filmmaker you create your own dream. And you never know beforehand how other people will look at it. If those other people then accept your dream as their own, that is a form of happiness. That is the wonder of cinema, or the wonder of art. Which Petrov’s Fluc has been sold to so many countries can really surprise me. It’s happening to me.’
Theater in between
Kirill Serebrennikov (52) is known as one of Russia’s most important theater makers, but has also been active as a film director for a long time (Playing the Victim† Yuri’s Day† leto† ‘My film experiments were always a kind of vacation, which I planned between the premieres of plays. But now it’s the other way around: I do stage in between. Taking a break from the movies.’