Yuri Dud: vDud: Balagov – yemu 27, a on snova na Canneskom festivale / [Balagov – He's 27 and He's at the Cannes Film Festival Again] (YouTube)

Yuri Dud: vDud: Балагов – ему 27, а он снова на Каннском фестивале. YouTube 11 June 2019. Kantemir Balagov and Yuri Dud.

Балагов – ему 27, а он снова на Каннском фестивале
[Balagov – He's 27 and He's at the Cannes Film Festival Again].
    RU 2019. P: Yuri Dud, his vDud channel in YouTube at UCMCgOm8GZkHp8zJ6l7_hIuA
    D+SC: Yuri Dud. Camera: Sergei Lynkov, Danila Yakovlev, Yuri Burykin. нежный редактор: Tatyana Mingalimova. опорный редактор: Yevgeni Statsenko. новенький: Aleksandr Golovin. императорский монтаж: Dmitri Paryonin.
    Yuri Dud interviews: Kantemir Balagov, Vladimir Bitokov (young director colleague who also visited Sokurov's workshop), Aleksandr Rodnyansky (producer of Beanpole).
    76 min
    Geheimtip from a trusted friend.
    Viewed at home in Helsinki with English subtitles on a television screen, 5 April 2020

Yuri Dud is a sports journalist who also runs the popular YouTube channel vDud. He interviews prominent Russian and CIS region figures and has more than 6 million subscribers.

Kantemir Balagov has been winning awards in Cannes for his first feature films Closeness (Теснота, 2017) and Beanpole (Дылда, 2019).

Coincidentally, having seen yesterday the Leo Tolstoy film adaptation The Cossacks (1961), set in Chechenia, I now view Yuri Dud's YouTube programme which starts in the neighbouring Kabardino-Balkarian Republic in the North Caucasus.

We find ourselves in its capital, Nalchik, the home town of the film director Kantemir Balagov. We get acquainted with its Potemkin facades and reminiscine on three movie theaters which carry heroic Soviet era names. A ghostly image of Stalin appears on a wall. Georgia is to the south from here, on the other side of the Caucasus.

As Yuri Dud and Kantemir Balagov wander around the discussion moves from self-censorship ("Russian cinema is afraid of its own shadow") to a lost sense of good neighbourhoodness, tattoos and clothes as statements ("green and ochre: the rust of life"), the key influence of Alexander Sokurov's workshop in Nalchik in 2010 and the moral inspiration of Svetlana Alexievich. Men are more deeply stuck in tradition while women have more freedom and strength of character. "I have deleted my Twitter and Instagram accounts to avoid distraction". Time is the greater auditor of a film's merit, not awards. When would you say that you have justified it all? "When Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov says I made a good, worthwhile film".

Balagov's favourite Russian films: The Cranes Are Flying, My Friend Ivan Lapshin and Flights in Dreams and in Reality (Полёты во сне и наяву, Roman Balayan, SU 1983). Favourite actors: Andrei Mironov, Oleg Yankovsky, Daniel Day-Lewis.

"Only a close person can really hurt you" (Kantemir Balagov on Closeness).