Петр Померанцев - Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible - The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

He asks me to sit down and tells me how much he likes my work. I know he’s lying, but he’s just so nice, nodding and agreeing at all the points he should be and engaging just enough to make me feel he’s genuinely interested. He says it must be odd for someone from London working inside Russia. I say “oh yes!” and tell him so many of my adventures and misadventures I don’t even notice half an hour has passed and all my discomfort at being at Ostankino has quite gone.

The next day his assistant phones to say Dr. Kurpatov really liked me and Ostankino wants to make me an offer. Whatever personality test that meeting was all about, I have passed. Would I like to helm a historical drama-documentary? With a real, big, mini-movie budget for actors and reconstructions and set designers? The sort of thing you make when you’re right at the top of the TV tree in the West and that TNT could and would never even dream of making. The genre is new in Russia, and it’s only now with Ostankino so flush that it can afford to do this. I’ve been wanting to emigrate away from straight observational documentary for a while, to think more about costumes and camera angles and a little less about funerals and sects and suicides.

The story is to be about a World War II admiral who defied Stalin’s orders and started the attack on the Germans, while the Kremlin was still in denial about Hitler’s intentions and hoped for peace. The admiral was later purged and largely forgotten. It’s a good story. It’s a really good story. It’s the dream project.

I tell her I need time to decide.

She says no rush.

The models project is so late, I’m so over budget, and the advance is so long spent that I’ve been asking for money from family to keep production going. With the end of the oil boom, places like SNOB have long stopped paying. I have had to move out of my old place with its grand view of the Moscow River into a smaller, grubbier, lower apartment. It’s right by one of the markets where traders from the North Caucasus sell replica designer suits and stolen phones. At night they get into fights with racist football fans underneath my windows. People in this part of town wear plastic Chinese slippers and carry their things in plastic bags. The warm little stores sell herring from open containers with a film of filth. The smell of the herring swells down the street, infused into the heat.

One morning I wake with the taste of burning in my mouth. There is smoke everywhere. I run to the kitchen to see whether the stove is on fire, but it’s fine, and now I look up and notice the smoke is outside on the street, too. Thick and prickly, green and yellowish, rubbing up against the closed window, pouring slowly through the open one I never shut in summer. It seems like the whole street is on fire. I push out onto the little balcony and see that it’s not just the street but the whole city. Buildings and sickly trees and the fly-over of the third ring-road are all half lost in haze. The smoke stings my eyes. It smells of fire and pine and forests, but mixed with gasoline, with traffic jams and perfume and something industrial. And it smells of peat. The peat fires are back.

This happens some summers. The peat fields around Moscow catch fire, and the smoke blows into town. Smoke so thick you can wrap it around you like a coat. Asthmatics, old people, and children are rushed away to relatives in the country. But then the smoke will go there, too. And they have to travel farther and farther, toward Petersburg or Bryansk or Monaco.

Out on the street the city seems abandoned. You almost push your way through the smoke. The first sign of another life-form is the sound of something going clack-clack-clack. At first the sound is startling. Then I realize: high heels. A girl goes by, dressed in heels, a bikini, and a dust mask. It’s that hot. And then more and more people emerge and disappear back into the smoke: a wedding party with the confetti being thrown up into the haze, where it seems to be lost forever. A cop looking quite lost. Couples kissing.

I buy beers and return to the apartment. The camera, the old beaten metal-cased Z-1, the picture resolution of which is past its sell-by date since the arrival of hi-def, is on my bed. There are tapes all around it with castings and tasters from my search for TNT’s positive stories. Many of the tapes are about Alexander: a blind football player, the star of Russia’s first blind football team. I had hoped his story would be inspirational. He’s someone who has overcome things: blind since childhood and now a potential para-Olympian.

On the tapes he looks like a Viking god with his long, red hair. He talks loudly and goes everywhere with his girlfriend, a quiet girl who teaches music to small children. When they walk she guides him gently beneath the elbow, around pillars and through doors. She’s part blind herself, with glasses as thick as the bottoms of bottles, but she can see more than Alexander.

Blind boys usually go out with girls who are partially sighted. The boys, especially the football players, act tough, but it’s the girls who are in charge. They can see. The blind boys are always worried their girls are looking at someone else. Or even kissing and touching someone else in the same room.

Alexander supports Dynamo Moscow. Every weekend he takes his place in the stands among the hard-core supporters behind the goal. He doesn’t listen to radio commentary, as most blind supporters do: he tells me he can feel what’s going on during the game with an inner football vision.

Dynamo Moscow is known for having racist supporters, and I soon find out Alexander is no exception.

“I can hear those darkies in the street. I can hear their language in the metro. My yard used to be full of the sound of Russian… when I hear those darkies I just come up and take a swing. Just like that.”

When he fights he swings wide and wildly. But when he connects it’s powerful.

“We believe Russia is a great empire that other powers want to tear away parts from. We need to restore our power, occupy our lost lands, grab Crimea from the Ukrainians,” the football supporters say, then in the same breath: “We want a Russia for Russians, all these darkies from the Caucasus and Central Asia need to go home.”

This has always been the paradox of the new Russian nationalism: on the one hand wanting to conquer all regions around, on the other wanting an ethnically pure great power. And all that comes out of this confusion is an ever-growing anger. There are more of them, hooligans and skinheads, lighting up the square opposite the Kremlin with their flares in marches of hundreds of thousands, chanting “jump if you’re not a darkie.” And when they jump together, the pavement trembles.

All the positive stories I touch on seem to tumble into negativity. On my bed there are more tapes, about a girl called Katja who has told me she managed to quit injecting amphetamines after a near-death experience. But when I begin to film her it turns out she’s been lying to me and is smoking morphine boiled down from prescription painkillers (illegally bought from pharmacies paying a cut to corrupt FDCS agents). Katja is always asking me for money, claiming she’s just been mugged or has someone after her she needs to pay off.

A bunch of girls from Kiev who call themselves Femen and who protest sex tourism by stripping down and running about naked at state events to highlight the sexism of the system sounded perfect for TNT. But suddenly they start protesting against the President. “The patriarchal is political,” they tell me when I call them. TNT would never touch them now.

I am running out of money. And I am considering joining Ostankino.

For every Call of the Void or blatant propaganda show Ostankino makes, there’s some edgy realist drama, some acerbic comedy. You can laugh and ignore the propaganda and watch the good stuff, and that’s what people I know do. There’s nothing bad about the film Channel 1 wants me to make; it’s a good story. And yet I realize that though my film might be clean, it could easily be put next to some World War II hymn praising Stalin and the President as his newest incarnation. Would my film be the “good” program that validates everything I don’t want to be a part of? The one that wins trust, for that trust to be manipulated in the next moment?