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Russia has strict laws when it comes to drug possession and trafficking. Severe penalties too. So the dealer doesn’t deliver to your house, but a кладмен (kladman) hides the order, which the customer then has to find.
Three friends. Four trips to Russia. Moscow in spring,
Kamchatka in the fall, and in winter to the
Baikal Lake,
Murmansk,
Salekhard, and Saint Petersburg. You have to see what those three came back with. ‘Whatever man wishes to see in our Mother Russia, is there to find.’
‘Encounters with Russians from six different generations help us get to know a Russia beyond Moscow and the Kremlin. Away from the 75th Victory Day parade and displays of military might, we meet the people of Russia. They tell us of a nation poised between tradition and the future.’
Short documentary film (11 m) from 2013 about love love love, or Любовь x 3. Love. Love. Love. is about love in all stages of life, from a female perspective. ‘A Sundance-winning short on the many shapes of Russian affection’ (more on
IMDb), made with love.
Boris Ryzhy (1974-2001)
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A poet whose death is often discussed more than his life or work. Just shy of joining the
Club of 27, but only by a little. In September 2001,
Boris Ryzhy would have turned 27, but in March, he took his own life. From his Завещание (Testament): Договоримся так: когда умру, ты крест поставишь над моей могилой: let’s agree on this: when I die, you will place a cross over my grave.
Переверни Пластинку = flip the record. In English, Flipside. Documentary (2016) about vinyl in Russia. And about records when vinyl was either unavailable or banned: pressed onto X-rays. See
How X-rays were used to smuggle banned music into the Soviet Union (Vice/Noisey, 2017) and
When Rock Was Banned in the Soviet Union, Teens Took to Bootlegged Recordings on X-Rays (Smithsonian Magazine, 2015).
Yury Dud’s Kolyma
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Колыма – родина нашего страха = Kolyma – birthplace of our fear. Documentary (made for YouTube) about Russia’s darker (or missing) pages. It did not go unnoticed, nor unchallenged. See, for example,
Gulag Documentary Takes Russian YouTube by Storm (The Moscow Times, April 30, 2019).
Cold, Colder, Coldest: Oymyakon
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Siberia probably ranks high on the list of places where people would rather not live. Because yes, it’s cold there. Not everywhere (Siberia is quite
large), but in some parts, it’s extremely cold.
Oymyakon (in
Yakutia) is famous for this. The thermometer has dropped to minus 71 degrees Celsius, making it the world record holder for the coldest inhabited place.
Russian Tattoo Tour
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Tattoo artist Herman IX from Moscow (
website,
VK) and filmmaker Stepan Vetoshnikov (
Vimeo) travel in two months from
Kaliningrad to
Vladivostok (over 7000 kilometers), funded by the money Herman earns along the way. Documentary, art, and road movie: it’s all of these combined and never too much.
Russian Design
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The Modern Russian Design (or новый русский дизайн) is about graphic design in Russia. Cyrillic letters and symbols in creative forms, from the last 20 years. Beautiful works and entertaining stories, by colorful designers.
Putin 3x
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Владимир Владимирович Путин is Vladimir Vladimirovich
Putin. Born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) on October 7, 1952, президент (= president) since Boris Yeltsin stepped down with this
speech on December 31, 1999. For the entire 21st century, Putin has been босс or the boss, even when
Medvedev was officially in charge for a short time.
