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| Images courtesy of Journeyman Pictures |
Homelessness is synonymous with the documentary form whether
it involves foraging on the streets as with American Winter, in
underground passageways like the 2000 film Dark Days, tent cities as
with Living in Tents, Netflix’s Lead Me Home and the HBO
documentary Homeless: The Motel Kids of Orange County. The problem of homelessness is endemic to all
societies around the globe and while it remains a complex issue that doesn’t
lend itself to any easy or simple solution, it nevertheless is an important
focus for documentary filmmakers trying to investigate and make sense of the
human stories foraging around for survival in decrepit ruins or alleyways. If there’s one positive thing you can say
about homelessness being documented on film or video, it might be that you’ll
never find more life and liveliness existing in the corridors of dead
buildings.
One place you rarely if ever see documentation of
homelessness on the cinematic medium is modern Russia and the chilly winter
streets of Siberia housing a disparate group of young runaways following the
breakup of the Soviet Union taking refuge inside derelict Soviet buildings once
belonging to secret weapons factories.
The brainchild of German cinematographer Nicolas Doldinger and British
filmmaker Jake Mobbs who both went far out on a limb to realize this intimate,
short documentary film comprised of interviews with street runaways. Including but not limited to learning
Russian, difficulty financing and running afoul of authorities not too keen on
highlighting Russian drug addicts possibly carrying infectious diseases, the
twosome nevertheless prevailed after a month of shooting in the winter and
another month in the summer, garnering some forty hours of footage to wade
through, translate and pare down to a watchable documentary. What unfolds is a most desperate human drama
of unpredictable street children living in the moment day to day on the fringes
of society.
Hard hitting including documenting (not on camera) the
deaths of three of the runaway kids in the circle due to starvation and
dangerously below zero temperatures, A Russian Fairytale as it cuts
between the self-named ‘Fairytale kids’ becomes an engrossing if not somber and
affecting portrait of homelessness.
Profoundly sad, chilly and at times a bit like what you might see in
some of Alexei Balabanov’s more extreme fare, this short documentary running a
little over an hour is a sobering look at an entire generation of kids
forgotten by modern society. While
basically a short documentary curiosity, the impact is long lasting if not
searing, offering a glimpse of an entire subsection of homelessness rarely
explored before by cameras. Not everyone
in this saga comes away clean, as there’s a pimp/boss in the situation echoing Danguolė
Rasalaitė case which inspired Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-ever and at one
point their hideout is raided by the police.
Why watch this film in an arena of documentaries
highlighting our own dealings with the epidemic of homelessness? When you look at the stories of these kids
caught between survival and subservience, starvation and sickness, the problem
though differing somewhat in shape and linguistics isn’t all that dissimilar
from that of our own. In many of the
domestic documentaries of street rats in big urban areas, we find the subjects
acting out of desperation and similarly yearning for a better life
elsewhere. A very real problem without a
real straightforward solution, A Russian Fairytale is bittersweet in how
it presents how far we can fall as individuals and how, somewhere amid all the
bleakness is a glimmer of hope for a better, happier future.
--Andrew Kotwicki
