St. Petersburg in the 1990s was a city at a crossroads, suspended between memories of the past and the chaos of a new era. Its historical name restored, it had yet to find a new essence. The films of that decade now serve as a unique archive of the city’s and its inhabitants’ inner state. They captured moments of a familiar world’s collapse and the search for new foundations: some sought to revive interrupted traditions, others unleashed the underground energies of the 1970s and 1980s, while some explored new experimental cinematic languages.

Feature films of the period turned to grand meanings and allegories. Aleksey Uchitel’s Obvodny Canal depicted the city as a space where incongruous realms coexist: a psychiatric hospital, a cultural centre, a theological academy, and a poetry home gathering—a place where reality and absurdity intertwine in surprising ways. Sergey Selyanov’s Whit Monday crafted a metaphysical parable about a man gifted with hearing the future yet doomed to remain captive to his own memories. Sergey Vinokurov’s Upyr placed a vampiric myth amid Kronstadt’s industrial outskirts, turning horror into a statement on post-Soviet emptiness. Alexander Bashirov’s The Iron Heel of Oligarchy brought St. Petersburg to the forefront of a utopian spectacle, where revolution and farce pulsed to the same rhythm. Victor Aristov’s Rains in the Ocean (completed by Yuri Mamin) transformed motifs from Alexander Belyaev’s novel into a chamber drama about three castaways adrift at sea—a metaphor for the collapse of grandiose ambitions.

In short films of the same years, these ideas were expressed with sharper edges and brighter contrasts, capturing fragile states, fragments of everyday life, voids, and grotesques. Timur Novikov and Sergey Shutov played with childlike images—an airplane, a submarine, penguins, a sunrise—turning them into postmodern signs of lost grandeur. Eduard Shelganov’s Group Portrait of Loneliness showed the impossibility of “holding still”—whether in frame or in life. Dmitry Frolov’s Phantoms of White Nights portrayed the city’s semi-phantasmal existence on the brink of vanishing, while Dimitri Lurie in Emptiness and Zhuk-1 explored corporeality and the raw nerve of the times. Olga Tobreluts’s Neo-Academism Manifesto became a declaration of a new artistic language.

Together, these films form a polyphonic portrait of a city groping for its identity in a transitional age. In 2025, revisiting these works is important: they allow us to feel the process of transition that unfolded 30 years ago. They remind us that culture not only sums up the past but also preserves traces of searches, mistakes, utopias, and hopes. Returning to them today, we see how the experience of a pivotal era resonates in our present.

Egor Sennikov