Not the Same as Everyone Else

A film about Pavel Kushnir — a musician who refused to compromise, in art or in conscience. A “great little man,” as his friends describe him, Pavel played sublime music for two elderly women in an empty community hall with the same devotion he would have brought to Carnegie Hall. He wrote extraordinary novels and dared to protest, fully aware of the consequences. In 2024, Pavel Kushnir died in a prison in Birobidzhan.

With his arrest in early June 2019, investigative journalist Ivan Golunov became a symbol in Russia of resistance to police misconduct. His case was perhaps the first time in the country’s modern history that civil society forced the law-enforcement system to retreat. Over the five difficult days it took to free Ivan, no one was closer to him, his family, and Meduza’s editorial staff than documentary filmmaker Sergey Erzhenkov and the camera crew who assisted him. In this new film from the “Black Flag,” we bring you the Golunov case through the eyes of those who were at the epicenter of these events.

"If the end is the salvation of the soul, then the end justifies the means." Following the will of his spiritual father, in Soviet times he swore allegiance to the atheists, in the 90s he welcomed money changers in the church, and in the 2000s he turned the church into an ideological department serving the authorities, and all in order to achieve the main goal - the creation of a Russian Vatican, powerful and independent of Caesar's corporation. Like Vladimir Putin, he came as a Westerner and a modernist, and will leave as a guardian and reactionary. A film about the life and ministry of the sixteenth Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kirill.

In the Apocalypse of John, there is such a thing as warmth. Being angry with the Laodicean church, the Lord reproaches: “I know your deeds; you are neither cold nor hot. ” Cold, that is, a sinner who denies or arguing with God, is not hopeless, he can come to salvation through repentance, but a warm, spiritually smoldering person who does not believe in ritual following his heart - such a person is against God. Punk is always a choice of two extremes. Or drink till you drop - or become an invete sober person. Hot or cold. But never warm. The heroes of the film are three generations of Russian punks - from “Automatic Satisfiers” to “Pornofilm”.