Part love story, part home movie, part acid trip – Marusja Siroječkovska’s film “How to save a dead friend” is a love letter to her soul mate, the sensitive Kimi, who was swallowed up by life in depressed Russia, but also a rebellious cry from the heart and a dedication to an entire silenced generation .
Soulmates, Marusja and Kimi, are a couple of Moscow millennials prone to suicide, hard drugs, alternating periods of euphoria and anxiety, all in the atmosphere of an oppressive autocratic regime. The couple spends a whole decade together and captures everything that comes with growing up in post-Soviet Russia, and unconditional love will reunite them to film the last dramatic act of their lives and keep Kimi’s mark, if only in moving pictures.
Silenced by the increasingly autocratic regime of the “depressed Federation”, 16-year-old Marusja decides that this will be her last year on Earth and that her life will become part of the suicide statistics like so many members of her generation of Moscow millennials. Then she meets Kimi and their unexpected love story develops in the atmosphere of an oppressive government.
Recorded over the course of 12 years, “How to save a dead friend” is a personal cry from the soul, but also a portrait of an entire Russian silenced generation and the euphoric anxiety that marked them.
The film, distributed by Restart Label, will go on tour in independent cinemas throughout the country on February 14 and will be shown in Zagreb (Dokukino KIC), Osijek (Kinematografi), Pula (Dnevni boravak DC Rojc), Rijeka (Art-kino), Šibenik (House of Art Arsen) and several other cities.
