UNE VIE ORDINAIRE

In 2016, director Aleksandr Kuznetsov accompanied Katya and Yuliya, two girls who were transferred directly from an orphanage in Siberia to a neuropsychiatric institution, for his documentary LIBERATION. THE USER’S GUIDE. No civil rights, no freedom, no family. Now the two have been released. Alexandr Kuznetsov accompanied them on their “integration” into society. Today, after the start of the war of aggression against Ukraine, he asks himself into which society exactly? He no longer lives in the Russian Federation himself and has rearranged the material he originally filmed.

There is the "election" in a nursing home for instance, where on each floor ballot papers are distributed to the assembled residents with the instruction "you must vote for Putin" and where a young man chops off the corners of the completed ballot papers with an axe as a sign that they have been counted. The “Great Patriotic War”, the victory over the fascists, is constantly celebrated here. And at the "Concert for Peace" – featuring a conductor with the Tsarist St. George's ribbon on his lapel - aerial combat footage from the Second World War is played behind the musicians. In retrospect, all of this proves to have been a preparatory measure for war, just like the battle re-enactments and May 9th parades.

Three years after being released from a psychiatric hospital, Yuliya received the keys to got the apartment she is entitled to by law, got married and now has two children. Both are sons. "You too will one day proudly defend our country" she tells them. Meanwhile, trains loaded with soldiers – cannon fodder - head into the unknown, and the police proceed with violence against anti-war demonstrators on the streets. A snapshot of the militarised interior of Russian society, the title AN ORDINARY LIFE is perhaps not coincidentally reminiscent of both Mikhail Romm's Soviet documentary classic ORDINARY FASCISM and Yuriy Khashchevatskiy's Lukashenko portrait ORDINARY PRESIDENT.

"A few years later, Alexander Kuznetsov reunites with the protagonists of his Liberation, the User’s Guide (VdR 2016), who are now free to lead their lives as they wish. While he dreams of their happiness, he accompanies them, powerless, down the path that is leading them straight to intransigent nationalism. An Ordinary Life is a film about loss, and grief." (Filmfestival Visions du Réel, Nyon, Schweiz, 2024).

Text: Bernd Buder

05.11.2024 | 19:30 | Glad-House (original version with English subtitles + simultaneous translation into German)

06.11.2024 | 12:00 | Glad-House (original version with English subtitles + simultaneous translation into German)

Supporting film: HYMN OF THE PLAGUE // GIMN CHUME (Alexander Epikhov, Dimitri Gorbaty and Philipp Ivanov, DE 2024, 12 min)