Boris Ryzhiy (film)

The main location was the Yekaterinburg district of Vtorchermet , where Boris Ryzhiy lived. The poet’s sister Olga, along with director Alyona van der Horst, enter the porches, ring apartments, try to find people who knew Boris. There are few of those left: some are no longer in the world, others have moved, still others simply do not want to communicate with strangers.

One of the friends of the Redhead, the poet Oleg Dozmorov , says that Vtorchermet is a difficult area, but Boris loved its dysfunctional inhabitants. He lived with a constant sense of guilt for having too much death in life. Another comrade, Sergey Luzin, called this condition an internal conflict: Red, being a young man from an intelligent family, felt like he was among strangers and a stranger among his own.

For Artyom’s son, father’s departure is connected with the fact that the feeling of pain, including someone else’s, is sometimes unbearable for poets.

At the Yekaterinburg cemetery, where the authors of the film come, there are rows of monuments and photographs with young faces. It was a generation of guards, Olga explains. People whose maturation coincided with a turning point in the life of the country gained freedom, but did not know how to dispose of it.

Modern shots alternate with black and white archive chronicles: Boris Ryzhiy talks about himself and his generation. The action takes place in the same courtyards. Pointing to the house where he lived for ten years, the poet explains that nothing has changed since his childhood - only bars appeared on the windows, and most of his beloved people passed away.

The film contains fragments of poems by Boris Red:

• “Guess me, gypsy, for a penny, explain to me why I will die” ^[1]
• “I do not have enough tenderness in verses, but I want tenderness to turn out” ^[2]
• “So granite is covered with ice and stand on the ground of cold” ^[3]
• “I turned the tram into Titova street , spraying lilacs in the sky” ^[4]
• “Urki lived in that house - the factory accepted them” ^[5]
• "Orders and aiguillettes in black velvet lie" ^[6]
• “Memory dump: miscellaneous, miscellaneous” ^[7]
• “The words of a trans-Asian poet will gain pan-European gloss” ^[8]

Alyona van der Horst came up with the idea to shoot a picture of Boris the Red after meeting the poet’s widow and his son. Born in Moscow and raised in Holland, Alyona did not know how Russians lived in the 1990s. According to the director, she wanted to make a film “about a poet and a man for whom life in that world and at that time <...> became unbearable” ^[9] .

During the installation, the director combined a modern video report that captured Vtorchermet’s life with the memories of his relatives, shots taken on the phone by the poet’s son Artyom, and episodes of the only surviving interview that Boris Ryzhiy gave to Yekaterinburg television (2000 recording). In addition, the film includes fragments of the Antibooker award ceremony, which Boris became the laureate in 1999 ^[9] .

Cinema expert Kristina Matvienko (“The Art of Cinema ”) not only saw rock dominating the poet in the film - in the heroes and heroines of “Red”, in their dialect, “the everyday neighborhood of the living and the dead,” she recognized the artistic world of the playwright of Yekaterinburg, Vasily Sigarev and the Urals prose writer Nicholas Kolyada ^[10] .

Andrei Plakhov ( Kommersant ), quoting Boris Ryzhiy’s lines “ earthly trash: bandits and poets ”, says that in a feature film such “classification of our population” would be accused of thickening colors. It is impossible to convict a film document of this ^[11] .

According to Martha Paknite, the director, having offered her interpretation of the poet’s life and death (through a study of social identity ), made an attempt to review the results of the perestroika enthusiastically met in the West. Boris Ryzhiy in the film is not only a “singer of the outskirts of the city”, but also “the voice of a lost generation ” ^[12] .

Film critic Zara Abdullaeva on Radio Liberty broadcast said that the film “ existential identity was shot, manifested and guessed”, and the editing stack, when young faces of today's Yekaterinburgers follow photos, gives a deeper understanding of the time than pasting the Soviet past ^{[ 13]} .

• 21st International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (2008) - Silver Wolf Prize
• Edinburgh Film Festival (2009) - Prize "For the best documentary"
• Russian national award “ Laurel Branch ” (2009) - nomination “Best Motion Picture” ^[14]
• Documentary Film Festival " Artdocfest " (2009) - participation in the competition program ^[15]

• Boris Red - poet (1974-2001)
• Artyom Ryzhiy - son
• Irina Knyazeva - wife
• Olga Sosnovskaya - sister
• Margarita Red - mother
• Sergey Luzin is a friend
• Oleg Dozmorov - friend and poet

• Alena van der Horst - Director
• Alena van der Horst - script
• Masha Ooms, Alena van der Horst - cameramen
• Harry de Wit - composer
• Frank van den Engel - producer

Movie page on IMDb