ALEXANDER RODNYANSKY: the exit into Loveless
Alexander Rodnyansky
SHORT PROFILE
Name: Alexander Yefimovich Rodnyansky
Date of Birth: July 2, 1961
Place of Birth: Kyiv, Ukraine
Profession: Producer, director, businessman
Andriy Alferov: In the early days of the war, you once said — or at least that’s how I remember it — that cinema, with its humanistic message, failed to prevent the war. Yet your book suggests that film is far from powerless. On one hand, it shapes role models for society, and on the other, it not only records what’s happening and warns of possible danger, but even anticipates it… How would you describe today the power and capacity of cinema to shape reality?
Alexander Rodnyansky: Just now, walking from the studio, I listened to a podcast — with a Russian blogger and publicist. A person I find extremely unpleasant and, in my opinion, deeply malicious. I didn’t listen to the whole thing — enduring something like that to the end is just impossible.
Why did I recall it? Because at the end, he was asked to recommend three books and three films. And he replied: «I don’t want to recommend any films or books, because no one needs them and they don’t change anything. The Bible was written two thousand years ago, and what good has it done? None. It’s all nonsense, and all those people with crosses on their buckles came to fight and kill. And today, some Christians are doing the same. It’s all rubbish».
I believe that’s a cultural misconception, one that even the most educated people sometimes suffer from. Namely: the perception of God or art, cinema in particular, as some higher authority that will inevitably come, judge, correct, punish, and fix everything.
А. А.: And how would you suggest people perceive cinema?
А. R.: As a conversation partner. As a teacher. Thoughtful viewers are like students in a university or pupils: they listen to the lesson, remember it, draw conclusions, absorb and process it. And then there’s the majority, which perceives it all as meaningless noise — at best letting it pass by, or at worst simply parroting a memorized text during exams and instantly forgetting it.
In other words, everything related to cinema is primarily decided by the individual watching it. It’s an entirely personal choice and a personal attitude. Either you take it seriously and engage with it as a mature person would — seeing what’s on screen as part of the human experience and therefore your own — and draw your own conclusions.
Say you watch a film about someone who was inspired by a dream but failed because they naively believed in easy success. If you take that in as your own experience — something you don’t have to endure in real life — it becomes meaningful. But if you view it superficially, as just another tale from a «made-up world», it simply slips past you.
Because this is not the responsibility of filmmakers or great artists — it’s your personal responsibility. Their task is to do it with talent, to offer the viewer a coordinate system, an emotional experience, their own conclusions, or a space in which to arrive at those conclusions. What you do with it — that’s up to you.
It’s like with a book: you can skim it, or you can study it deeply and see, hear, and feel. That emotional experience may become part of who you are, it may influence you — or it may not. And the artist has nothing to do with that. If they’re guilty of anything, it’s only of not telling the whole truth in their statement.
These constant complaints from the underread and undereducated — like, «what’s the point of all this culture, especially Russian, if it didn’t prevent Russian aggression» — are just excuses. Excuses from people far removed from culture itself. And this is less a fight with Russian culture than with the very idea of culture. Because culture has never stopped anyone from anything.
Great German culture — rich, diverse, powerful, with its philosophy, music, literature — from Goethe to Heine, from Schiller to modern authors like Günter Grass — didn’t stop Nazi aggression either. Just as great American literature doesn’t prevent the American government from making countless mistakes.
А. А.: Since you mentioned Germany, allow me to quote Thomas Mann. He said that there aren’t two Germanys — a good one and an evil one — but rather one Germany, whose best qualities, under the influence of some devilish manipulations, were transformed into an embodiment of evil. At what point did you feel that Russia — the country you were living in at the time — was also beginning to be turned, gradually, through manipulation, through cinematic manipulation, into an entirely different country?
А. R.: I wouldn’t even call it cinematic manipulation. Cinema, in my view, is a relatively weak means of mass communication.
А. А.: But wasn’t it cinema that helped shape the new ethics in Russia? Wasn’t it?
А. R.: It rather participated in the process. I think it began a long time ago — back in the 2000s. That’s when a kind of rollback happened — from the trajectory of liberal development toward what you might call cinematic manipulation. Even though, on the surface, there was a lot of talk about liberalism, and the main laws of market economy were adopted — those very laws that still function in Russia and, judging by the state of the economy, sometimes even quite successfully.
Ideologically speaking, this was the moment when Russia, so to say, began to «regain consciousness»: oil prices were rising, there was serious money coming in, and it started being invested into infrastructure; industry began to develop, new economic sectors emerged.
Russia became competitive in a number of high-tech fields. Take the internet, for example. It was — and still is — largely autonomous. They don’t use Google as the main search engine, but Yandex. Not Facebook as the main social network, but VKontakte… or Odnoklassniki.
I gave those examples to illustrate the explosive growth Russia experienced at the time. There was a huge surge in new entrepreneurs who began to feel their own power. The country was thrown — quite literally — from an inferiority complex straight into a superiority complex.
That’s a bit of a joke, of course… But as with any joke, there’s a grain of truth in it. And this shift — from inferiority to grandeur — directly correlates with the price of oil. If a barrel costs eight dollars — that’s the inferiority complex. If it’s a hundred and forty — that’s megalomania.
Just imagine the volume of money that started flowing into all of this. Naturally, it led to a resurgence of former imperial sentiments. A revision began of all the ideological frameworks that had guided the 1990s. And from there, the process only accelerated.
In 2007, Putin delivered his Munich speech. On the surface, it seemed to concern only high-level geopolitics. But in reality, it also impacted the country’s internal life, becoming a kind of action plan for parts of the ideological apparatus. And from that point, things only escalated — leading to 2014: the annexation of Crimea, Donbas…
This wasn’t just a reconstruction of former ideological beliefs. A kind of new, market-oriented ideology emerged. And all those things that hadn’t worked out in the Soviet Union… I’d put it this way: today’s Russian leadership learned a few lessons. They don’t repeat the USSR’s mistakes and have no illusions about so-called liberal ideology or Western values. Cinema joined this process too, beginning to revive certain key narratives. A re-evaluation of the recent past took place.
If in the 1990s — and even in the late 1980s — the screens were flooded with criticism, primarily driven by the unveiling of horrifying, previously hidden pages of Soviet history (the years of Red Terror, repression, millions of victims, the Gulag), and amid this exposure the achievements of the Soviet utopian project — in science, industry, education — were being overshadowed, then starting from the early 2000s, the accomplishments of the Soviet era gradually began to re-enter the public discourse. The Soviet Union came to be seen as, to a large extent, justified.
А. А.: What makes your book Loveless unique — beyond your remarkable command of language — is a particular point of view: you look at twenty years of the country’s history not through the mirror of the screen where that history is reflected, but through nine films… As you show how Russia is changing, you simultaneously describe what your native Ukraine is experiencing during this time. But if you had to trace Ukraine’s recent history — from the moment Independence was declared — through nine films, which ones would you choose?
А. R.: That’s a difficult question, Andriy. A very difficult one. Sometimes I feel I’m not sufficiently informed on the subject. But what I’ve most lacked — and still lack — in Ukrainian cinema, national media, communications, and politics, is an honest conversation with the audience.
Because in Russia, that conversation did happen. And it seems to still be happening. Though I don’t really follow today’s Russian cinema, I do occasionally hear that certain films appear which attempt to reflect the current state of mind over there. Maybe that’s an exaggeration — I don’t know…
Back in the 1990s and 2000s, there were films that truly captured those times — films that serve as artistic testimonies to the era and the state of people’s consciousness. In the 1990s, it was first and foremost Balabanov. Or Abdrashitov’s Time of the Dancer — such an important document of that period. The 2000s — that would be Zvyagintsev, Khlebnikov, Popogrebsky. If we’re speaking, of course, about dramatic cinema. That’s just the surface — I’m leaving out many names.
Even in so-called commercial cinema, made for mass audiences, there were films that very precisely captured the spirit of the time with its ideological undercurrents. Take Bekmambetov’s Night Watch — a very important conversation about the era, or 9th Company, Stalingrad, Legend No. 17. All of these are reflections of their time.
I’m not trying to evaluate these films as good or bad. It’s just that they are linked to their historical moment, to people’s mental state, to their relationship with the past — all the things that, in one way or another, shape Russia’s self-perception.
In Ukraine, I don’t know of such films. The only example that comes to mind as a high-level statement is The Tribe (2014) by Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi, which, in my opinion, illuminates a certain layer of society. No other film, for me, contains testimony about the life I know in Ukraine.
А. А.: Why is that?
А. R.: Because life in Ukraine has been richer, more diverse, more conflicted, more contradictory, more interesting than what’s been shown in our cinema over all these years.
Even national television was far more adequate in reflecting real life in Ukraine than cinema ever was. So I’m not sure I could describe the recent history of our country through nine Ukrainian films made over the past two decades.
Maybe you could suggest a film — made by a Ukrainian — about the real Ukraine?
А. А.: What about A Friend of the Deceased (1997), based on Kurkov’s novel and directed by Vyacheslav Kryshtofovych — practically a classic? It reflects the life of a confused country that had gained freedom and didn’t know what to do with it…
А. R.: I rewatched it recently. I was living in Ukraine at that time, and I don’t recognize it at all in that film. To me, it’s an entirely imagined reality. Even theatrical. There’s no real life in it. I actually think that even in our TV series The Birthday of the Bourgeois, there’s more of the real Kyiv and Ukrainian life from those years. And that was pure fiction, in a very genre-driven and therefore simplified form. But it still engages more with reality than A Friend of the Deceased does.
А. А.: I can’t agree with you on that. To me, A Friend of the Deceased precisely captured the country’s confusion — not knowing what to do with its newfound independence… But now I’d like to ask something else. Why has our narrative cinema, unlike documentary film, reflected the life of the country so poorly — with rare exceptions, of course? Why can a documentary filmmaker afford to be honest, while a fiction director apparently cannot? How do you explain that?
А. R.: My explanation is very technical, straightforward. It comes down to established traditions: Ukrainian documentary cinema, which existed at non-fiction film studios like Ukrkinochronika and Kyivnaukfilm, was strong. Even during the Soviet era, significant names and films regularly emerged from there, works that became major events on the all-Union or even international level. There were great directors.
In narrative cinema, both Ukrainian film studios that produced it — the Dovzhenko Studio and the Odesa Film Studio — each, in their own way, avoided reality. The Odesa Studio was known for its high-quality genre films aimed at a broad mass audience. With the exception of the brilliant and eccentric Kira Muratova, who stood apart and spoke to the viewer in her entirely unique language — though she addressed deeply universal themes. There was nothing specifically Ukrainian in her films.
The Dovzhenko Studio, on the other hand, was known for its steady output of falsehoods. Apart from Parajanov and Osika, it mostly produced fake films about a non-existent reality — party-line, servile productions. The only segment that stood out was the so-called «urban group», which consisted of just a few people — Balayan, Kryshtofovych, Belykov, Ershov, and a couple of others — who tried to make sincere films. The rest were focused on Moscow, producing universal quasi-Soviet cinema and speaking about everything except life in Ukraine at the time.
Balayan and Kryshtofovych made their intelligent films under the television division of the Dovzhenko Studio, where censorship was not as harsh. Naturally, it was Kryshtofovych who later directed A Friend of the Deceased, which was selected for one of the parallel programs at Cannes — the Directors’ Fortnight. That’s unquestionably a success! And my personal opinion doesn’t in any way diminish the achievement of that film. It was also based on a novel by a major Ukrainian writer (Andrey Kurkov).
From the moment independence was declared, national cinema essentially died. There was no money, the studios were literally falling apart before everyone’s eyes. Everything was quickly looted. There were neither resources nor people to make films. No new young talents emerged. The new generation — what we now call Contemporary Ukrainian Cinema — didn’t make its presence known until the 21st century. And that generation grew up on films, including those made in co-production with Russia, and later on, within Russia itself.
А. А.: One of the films made in co-production with Russia during that time is 9th Company. It’s perhaps the only one among the nine films you seem to… apologize for. For the silences it contains…
А. R.: I wouldn’t say I apologize, but I do acknowledge that today the film is perceived differently. The same applies to Stalingrad. But 9th Company especially — because its message aligns with today’s rhetoric, which sounds at best ambiguous, if not outright troubling: «our boys». Especially to a Ukrainian ear. And, frankly, to any decent person.
The film’s answer to the question of the war’s meaning is: «we fight for each other». As in, we’re dying, the government has immorally sent us into an unjust and dirty war; we are forced to kill civilians, the citizens of another country, for some vague goals in a war that has nothing to do with us.
But we go through with it, and we’re honest with one another, we die for one another, we stand by one another. Like in that old Soviet story by Leonid Panteleev, An Honest Word. Remember it? A boy is posted as a sentry, and he stands his ground, even as night falls. That’s something I do acknowledge.
А. А.: In your book, you write that you found success in the Ukrainian SSR, in independent Ukraine, and in Russia. And yet there’s a sense of… estrangement in all three dimensions: you seem to be successful, recognized, and loved by all — but at the same time, a little bit of an outsider everywhere. You were pushed out of Ukraine, seen as a stranger in Russia, even called a «Banderite»…
А. R.: You know, I wouldn’t call it estrangement. It’s more what’s sometimes referred to as «scissors»: when what I wanted diverged from what others wanted — from what the country wanted. There were just a few brief periods when we aligned, when I breathed the same air as the country and its people, when we moved in step.
One of those periods was during perestroika. Everything came together for me then. I felt the spirit of the time and found my place — as a documentary filmmaker. Another relatively short period was in the mid-1990s — the launch of the 1+1 TV channel, and the years that followed, when it felt like a new, European Ukraine had emerged.
I truly believed Ukraine would become exactly that. I was more patriotic then than all the patriots put together. That’s why 1+1 quickly became the country’s leading channel. But then those «scissors» of differing visions of the world began to open again.
The same thing happened during a short period in Moscow, where I arrived in 2002. And that lasted until about 2006. A happy time, when everything seemed possible, when it felt like Russia was becoming a successful European power — like France or Germany; that I could make films about things that mattered to me, and they would be just as relevant as those in Germany or France; that we would live a shared life and hold common values with the rest of the civilized world…
And in all three cases, at some point, things went in the wrong direction. The thing is, I never changed my beliefs. I always considered myself someone who could easily adapt to circumstances. But now, looking back, I realize — I don’t actually adapt. I keep making the same mistake over and over again: trying to coexist until it becomes impossible. And I hold on for as long as I can.
The Soviet Union collapsed on its own. But toward the end, it became clear that perestroika had failed, and the USSR didn’t turn into the liberal empire we had all hoped for. And Ukraine didn’t become a civilized European democracy — it became a country with a degrading economy. The only post-Soviet republic, in fact, where the economy declined instead of growing.
Even Belarus saw its GDP quadruple. In Moldova — which, like Ukraine, is one of the poorest countries in Europe — GDP increased fivefold. It’s a shame, because we used to be in first place within the Soviet Union: Ukraine’s GDP per capita was higher than Russia’s. Where did it all go?
Even in our best years — 2007 or 2013 — we still couldn’t reach the GDP level of 1990. Let alone everything else: the model of the country and so on. In my view, it simply didn’t happen. Since I wasn’t planning to change the country, I moved to another one. But that didn’t work out either. So no — I’m not an outsider.
My value system — liberal and humanist, shaped during Soviet times — has remained the same. I don’t believe there are nations that inherently carry either positive or negative values. I believe that every people can give rise to both saints and devils, to righteous individuals and criminals.
It’s the same in Ukraine: there have always been — and still are — both remarkable, absolutely honest people, and others who are opportunists or outright scoundrels.
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