Genres:
Documentary, Full-length
Director: Alexey Khanyutin
Operator: Alexandra Ivanova, Mikhail Gorobchuk, Grigory Apalyais, Ainar Kurmanguzhina and others
Producer: Ekaterina Meliksetova
Producer company : Parallax Pictures
Year: 2024
Country: Russia
Duration: 1 h. 35 min.
Languages: Russian
Description
During the Soviet era, more than 30,000 Lenin monuments were put up across the USSR. These monuments were strategically placed where Lenin could symbolically “see” his teachings being brought to life. His presence had a positive influence on the surrounding area: flowerbeds were planted, flags raised, and blue spruces were carefully arranged near these monuments, creating a kind of portal to the communist future. But what does Lenin see today? And what do these “islands of the future” look like now? How do the descendants of those who built communism view Lenin today? The film consists of 10 short stories, each shot in different regions of Russia.
About the director:
Alexei Khanyutin
Filmmaker. President of the Guild of Non-Fiction Film and Television, Artistic Director of Parallax Pictures, and head of the Film and Television Directing Department at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Born in 1956 in Moscow, he graduated from the Directing Department of VGIK (1978, Roman Karmen’s workshop) and later earned his PhD at the Institute of Art History, where he also worked as a research fellow. During perestroika, he directed notable films such as Hot Spot and DMB-91 (which won the Golden Centaur Prize at Message to Man) at the Central Studio of Documentary Filmmaking. He began to teach film directing in the mid-1990s at the Higher Directing Courses and the Internews Documentary Film School, and headed a directing workshop at VGIK.
