“You can choose to be Leni Riefenstahl or Marlene Dietrich” : horrified by the war in Ukraine, filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov, now based in Berlin, told AFP that he had left his native Russia for a question of “awareness”.
By referring to the leading filmmaker of the Third Reich and the legendary actress engaged against Nazism, the one who is nicknamed the terrible child of Russian cinema and theater evokes the choices, even the dilemmas, faced by artists in Russia. today.
If the artists “decide to live forever in Moscow and work for power, it’s their choice, I don’t want to judge them. Others try to start a whole new life, (…) it’s their choice too “he says during the interview at the Deutsches Theater.
“I made my choice. (…) I can only speak for myself”, he adds, claiming to feel “horror, sadness, shame and pain” against the Russian invasion.
Especially since he is the son of a Ukrainian. “On my Soviet passport, I was Ukrainian. (…) My mother had encouraged me not to put ‘Jewish’ like my father, because it was ‘safer’. Then, afterwards, everyone had become Russian”he said.
Leaving Moscow legally a month ago, after a reduced sentence in an embezzlement case deemed politicized by his supporters, he also says he is “privileged”with an apartment in Berlin and invitations all over Europe: he is preparing to present a film at the Cannes Film Festival, an opera in Amsterdam and a play at the Avignon Festival. “Some artists (…) have no money, no visa”underlines the 52-year-old filmmaker.
But he also left because he “felt inside this war”. “It’s a matter of conscience”assures Serebrennikov who was in the middle of filming Limonov, about the Russian dissident. He does not know when he will see his homeland or his 90-year-old father again, who has remained in Rostov-on-the-Don, his hometown on the border with Ukraine. He does not want to speak of exile but of a “new page in my life”.
According to him, the Iron Curtain is worse than in Soviet times. “Towards the end of the USSR, there was a smell of rot, it was clear that it was over. Today, and I don’t want to play the Cassandras, this taste of blood and fear will make you suffer many people”.
For him, the “horrible murders (in Ukraine) look like self-destruction”believing that the conflict is the result of “several years of terrible propaganda”. However, he remains uncomfortable with the “injunctions” addressed to Russian artists. “It’s not really great when someone forces you to decide for or against. It reminds us (Russians) of something.” And even if the idea that artists become “dogs of war” bristles him, he assures: “You can choose to be Leni Riefenstahl or Marlene Dietrich; it’s a choice and we have to respect it.”
In Russia, “almost every day there are lawsuits against people who wrote on social media and articles or held a sign saying No to war. (…) You say something and immediately the police come to you stopped”. He considers that there are several forms of resistance. He cites as an example of directors who refused to receive their prize at the prestigious Golden Mask ceremony, preferring to dedicate it to Dmitry Muratov, co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and editor-in-chief of the investigative journal Novaya Gazeta. “We also tried to protect an artist (Sasha Skochilenko, editor’s note) who had changed price tags in supermarkets with information about the war. (…) She is in prison today”.
Known for his daring creations, his support for LGBT + people, the artist was sentenced in 2020 for embezzlement to a three-year suspended prison sentence, with a ban on leaving Russia.
Is he an activist? Dissident? The director of Leto and of Petrov Feverwanna “just be an artist”. But, he nuances, “sometimes people who do theater or art say: ‘I have nothing to do with politics’ but, in general, art is politics”. “I hate to play the victim but it is clear that (the lawsuit) was related to my work”he says
He will try to go at all costs to Cannes, where he will present his film on Tchaikovsky’s Wifea genius whose private life is “totally ignored by the Russians”. Affirming “to understand” Ukrainians’ calls for a boycott of Russian films, he specifies: “It’s not Tchaikovsky who bombs, any more than me… Boycotting culture is a continuation of the war”.