Stories From A Different World: The Dark And Brutal Realism Of Post-Soviet Cinema

The rare, note-worthy films produced in ex-Soviet states in recent years are, by their vast majority, obscure and gut-crunching, thus largely passed by the general audience.

However, when noticed they have often been deemed as a large-scaled cinematic masterpiece.

Heavy in their narratives, grey in their visuals, soaked with grievous realism, these works usually reflect a world unfamiliar to a Western viewer. Does this make these works less worthy of your attention? The short answer is no. The longer one hopefully lies somewhere within this article.

There is a vital distinction I must first make. There is soviet cinema in its’ Golden Age of the 70s-90s - the sweet, pastoral escape scenarios, giving a sense of wistful longing for a time that was truly never there; and then, there are films that started to be produced in independent countries after the Soviet Union's collapse.

The difference between the two is striking. The first category has the state's ideology subtly ingrained in it, whereas the second one does everything to show the salient fall of said ideology.

The former often tells light-hearted stories with likeable personas and happy endings: they are what one now could call “feel-good” movies  drowning in bittersweet nostalgia. The latter category depicts the lives of people for whom the nostalgia has faded and only brutal reality now remains.

As more independent directors began to rise in these countries, a cinematic take could depict the devastating effects of a broken system on the average people: their mental state, work, and relationships. This resulted in stories from a different world - real to a point of being difficult to watch.

All post-Soviet cinematic narrations invite the viewer to be a silent observer of the painful settings that characters are placed in, which can, at first, seem uneventful and tame: a workplace, a school, an average household.

Through this purposefully habitual and unexciting context, the director is allowed to achieve one of their primary goals: targeted examination of human nature. By not fixating on the setting of the outer world and its happenings, a writer has the freedom to shift the focus on the inner world unfolding within the characters themselves, its depth and breadth.

This directing move strikes first of many significant distinctions this genre of film has with the typical Hollywood cinema.

We, as viewers, are used to seeing people on the screen living exciting, busy lives we could often only dream of. It is a sweet escape from reality we can afford to embark on for a couple of hours. On the startlingly opposite end of post-soviet kino, the reality is depicted in its most disturbing and gruesome forms, and we find ourselves happy to be on the opposite side of the screens.  

The direct and raw style in which the camera work in these works is usually done, in turn, unavoidably leads to us falling into the hero’s antics, developing a much more intimate connection with them. The viewer suddenly finds themselves deeply entrenched in the entirety of feelings, moral conflicts, and any extra portions of emotional turmoils that the director has decided to add.

In these fleeting moments, the real story begins to unfold. All of a sudden, what could at first be described at best as a dull and slow plotline, turns into a complex storyline of personal and moral conflict ending either in a powerful build of character or a tragic failure of it.

Then, the viewer might find themselves in a peculiar position: it’s often extremely difficult to be rooting for the protagonist. Reason? They oftentimes cannot be labeled as good people. Instead, the protagonist is floating between the loose edges of good and bad, questioning the meanings of these traits altogether.

Simply put, if the writers succeeded at their job, the characters would be layered and complex, just like human beings are. The heroes can find themselves torn in a personal conflict and the viewers are likely to find themselves torn along with them.

A prominent example is Kolja in Leviathan (2014, Russia), a west praised Russian tragic drama and a Cannes nomine. Kolja is a middle-aged car mechanic struggling to accept the reality of a corrupt mayor trying to seize his house. In the process, he has to observe how everything he deems important is falling apart. It is an emotionally draining but brilliantly told narrative of the man who’s lost a fight before starting one. The atmosphere of hopelessness and despair established at the very beginning only intensifies and culminates later in the film.

Another story is Harmony Lessons (2013, Kazakhstan), revolving around Aslan, an ostracized and troubled 13-year-old living in a Kazakh village with his grandmother.

The already dire to begin with environment in which the boy finds himself - the opening scene shows Aslan passing his time by slaughtering sheep - is further aggravated when he is humiliated and bullied by his classmates.

This magnifying glass over the down spiraling mental state of the young boy is yet another example of the prominent post-Soviet cinematic work unapologetically depicting uncomfortable realities people often try to shut their eyes at.

There are many other recurring themes in these works, and one has to not forget about the unique nuances we can sense in the movies according to the particular and definite cultures of the countries in which each film was produced.

What makes these films so often difficult to process is the persistent idea throughout the movie implying that the situations characters find themselves in are dead-ends. The characters start within positions that they have little control over by virtue, and which they have little power to change.

By-products of the system that only benefits an elite they are not a part of, the protagonists can attempt to fight the system, just to be inevitably quelled by it. Or they can choose to suppress what is man’s natural, burning desire for self-determination and accept the injustices they must now exist in - an equally heart-breaking outcome. 

Still, there is a place in those movies for brief heartwarming moments. However, these instances often appear as bleak glimpses of joy in an otherwise painful existence. This makes the scenes where characters are finally happy bittersweet - we know it is a short-lived escape; real problems are waiting just around the corner, growing in anticipation to be discovered.

This genre and a particular style is not a new phenomenon for Russia - human suffering and the failure of the state system have been centric to its most prominent literature pieces for centuries. The fact that these narratives are now present, distinctly, in films produced by other post-soviet and satellite states such as Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Estonia et cetera, showcases how much of an effect that period of occupation in history has had on the mentality in such states. It’s an unsolicited, unwanted dark legacy, as it is a legacy of a system that creates a brewing environment for such works to be made.