Steel blue lock held back, straight back, muscular shoulders. Marusya Syroechkovskaya, a 34-year-old Russian filmmaker, immediately appears as a reserved and shock-resistant young woman. In his first feature-length documentary, the gripping How to Save a Dead Friendpresented in the ACID section at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, she pays a posthumous tribute to Kimi, her former boyfriend carried away by drugs, on November 4, 2016.
Filmed over a period of twelve years, this diary tells of a generation reduced to silence, with the coming to power of Vladimir Putin in the 2000s. “They say that Russia is for the Russians. No, Russia is for sad people. It is a federation of depression”comments, in voiceover, the director.
Born in 1989, Marusya Syroechkovskaya grew up in a middle-class family living in the suburbs of Moscow. Amateur filmmaker grandparents, a mother at home, an entrepreneur father… In the summer, like many Russian tourists in the 1990s, they left their landscape of bars as far as the eye could see to visit the countries of the eastern Mediterranean (Turkey , Cyprus, Egypt, etc.).
At 15, the teenager sees close friends disappear and does not recover. Liosha jumps from a roof, Ilia throws herself under a car. She herself thinks about suicide all the time and ends up being sent by her parents to a psychiatric hospital for a few months. “I didn’t know how to ask for help, how to express my feelings. The camera allowed me to make sense of what was around me and to protect myself from life too. When I left, I went to film the opposition marches, demonstrations against Putin, in 2005-2006. The police were arresting people, mostly men, but it wasn’t as brutal as it is today. Since the war in Ukraine, everyone has been there, women, bicycle delivery men, anyone… and there are beatings, doors engraved with a Z [l’un des symboles peints sur les blindés engagés dans l’invasion contre l’Ukraine]. »
150 hours of videos
Marusya and Kimi bond with the punk sounds of Nirvana and Joy Division, share the same hatred of Russia, film themselves a lot, consume themselves with psychotropics, baptize their first cat Ian in memory of the leader of Joy Division, Ian Curtis, who committed suicide in 23 years. Comes idleness. Then, the burst of life for her and the renunciation for him. A will-o’-the-wisp above his head, the ravages of depression in a sticky room from which one no longer leaves.
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