How to Save a Dead Friend (2022)

How do you capture love? How do you capture friendship? How do you capture pain from watching them slip away through your fingers as addiction takes hold of your loved one? Marusya Syroechkovskaya’s rough and dynamic yet deeply candid account of her 12-year-long friendship with Kirill, aka Kimi, is a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of post-Soviet Russia. By closely zooming in on two young lives, Syroyechkovskaya reveals the painful experiences of the first generation of Russians who were coming of age during Putin’s presidency.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Marusya Syroechkovskaya and Anastasia Kostina.

Watch the trailer.

Speakers

Marusya Syroechkovskaya is a Moscow-born award-winning filmmaker and visual artist. Marusya studied filmmaking at the School for Documentary Film and Theater of Marina Razbezhkina and Mikhail Ugarov, and received her MA in Film Directing at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Her student short, Exploration of Confinement received a Jury Award at the New Orleans Film Festival 2013 and qualified for the 2013 Academy Awards.

Anastasia Kostina is a scholar of documentary media, women’s film history, Soviet and Russian cinema. She holds a PhD in Film & Media Studies and Slavic Languages & Literatures from Yale University. Her current book project, Engendering Soviet Documentary: Esfir Shub Between Theory and Practice, explores the relationship between politics, aesthetics and gender during the nascent stage of documentary cinema. The work aims to highlight the career of Esfir Shub, the first female documentarian of the Soviet Union. Anastasia is a co-editor of a collected volume titled The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism, which introduces readers to the key figures, institutions, and practices of contemporary Russophone documentary cinema. In addition, her writings on film and media have been featured in such publications as Feminist Media Histories, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, KinoKultura, and Apparatus.

This film screening is presented as part of The New Russian Documentary, which is inspired by the collected volume of the same title. The series presents a curated selection of essential films that challenge the status quo and offer rare insights into contemporary Russia.