Pavel Pechenkin

Born in the village of Kusya, Perm Region, lives in Perm since 17. Director of documentaries, producer, teacher, creator of the «Novyi kurs» («New Course» — ed.) film studio and the Perm Cinematheque project, president of the International Film Festival Flahertiana.

Quotes

• Documentary cinema is completely clear in terms of ethical positions, like literature.
• Documentarians' motivation is not to make money, but to speak out.
• Human laziness in everything upsets me. And the lack of professionalism among the executives does the same.
• I am engaged in the creation and development of pedagogy based on showing and making films.
• Music is a movement, modern art, cinema is a temporal movement that can be put on music.

My story

I was born in the village of Kusya, Gornozavodsky district, in the former diamond capital of the Soviet Union. The family was of dispossessed kulaks, and even when I came to work on television in 1985, I was considered to come from an unreliable family. My father was not allowed to develop professionally, and we moved to the Kaliningrad region. From there, however, we retired: the parents were scared for my brother and me because we were playing war with real trophy weapons and jamming fish with «pineapples.» Therefore, we left for my mother's homeland, Vetluga, and at the age of 17, I ended up in Perm: I entered the Polytechnic Institute in the footsteps of my elder brother.

At the third course, I realized that I had gotten in the wrong place, and began studying literature, writing poems and stories. I graduated from the three-year course of art history and the two-year course of journalism at the faculty of social professions. That time I went to the library and spent there ten years. I read everything: the year was devoted to Tolstoy, the next to Dostoevsky, then to the poets of the beginning of the century, there were Hemingway, Rilke, and Max Frisch, and Faulkner, and Marcel Proust. I read with a thirst to find out what people appeared on earth for and why do they live. This is the most important education that I received in life. Everything in me was shaped under the influence of great literature.

Then I started experimenting with the visual imagery. Together with the poets Vitaly Kalpidi and Slava Drozhaschikh we created the slide poem «In the Shadow of Kadriorg.» The lyrics belonged to Vitaly and Slava, I was responsible for the video series and music. These experiments led me to the cinema.

I was always arranging something, starting with parties in schools. I organized an experimental theater at the Regional Center of Folk Art, where I worked as a methodologist. We conducted discos, themed programs, I showed my slides. At the same time, he started a joint workshop where Andrei Bezukladnikov, Slava Smirnov, I, Vyacheslav Borozdin, photographers and artists worked. We lived in each other's pocket. Then I took the camera because I was interested in the motion. It was a primitive stage of the visual range experience. It all ended with the fact that our experiments were shut down, all of us were fired, and we got into the book «Far from the state borders: about ideological sabotage of enemy intelligence services in the Urals.» Our texts were published in printed form, and our joint manifesto was in the book in parallel with the abstract art manifesto of Mark Rothko. For us, this was the highest praise, but for our persecutors, a curse.

Then a few confused and not very successful attempts to learn the cinema happened — now there were scandals, now the director to whom I wanted to go to the studio went to shoot... So I went to work for Perm television to learn the technology, then understood it and quitted. I decided to use my organizational skills and created the «Novyi kurs» («New course») film studio, where I still work.

We started with commercials. The first film was ordered by the city administration: about the toxicomania problems, which were relevant for 1988. We found the hero, filmed him, but the didactic, instructive story wasn't the shape of my heart. The next sponsored film was a story about the rehabilitation of people after the «lock-down.» We managed to shoot some gutty interviews with a spycam. It was already a real film, but it wasn't accepted at all: it moralized only a little, and put too philosophical questions.

In parallel, I made a film about a geriatric home, «A House with Windows in Silence.» From above, the building resembled the letter «H,» and in the magazine of this institution the letter «H» meant that the person was no more, he died. Of course, this was the final frame. The film itself is about how the old people, having received neither education nor upbringing, found themselves without family and relatives, and they were given a chance not to die under the fence. And they are sitting in the lobby, watching TV, which shows the perestroika and glasnost. They sit, live their last days and see that their life was lived in vain. It is a terrible story, a tragedy. I sent this film to the first documentary film festival in the Soviet Union.

Testosterone poisoning of youth still moved me towards the fiction cinema. I made the film «Favorite,» and it was released on all screens of the Soviet Union, a few months before the 1991 putsch. And although the film was watched by about four million people, hyperinflation occurred and all the money from the rental turned into dust, which meant I didn't achieve the result: I wanted to build a film studio with the money. After this event, I could not hear the word «cinema» for about a year.

Then a friend of mine came to Perm, and he had just returned from the documentary film festival in Oberhausen, where he received the main prize — 10,000 marks, which in those times were an incredible amount. I was surprised that you can get money for documentary films, and decided to continue. I contacted the Sverdlovsk Film Studio and began making my own documentaries. Then I shot my best pictures. In 1996, we made the last movie on film, Pictures from the Life of a Provincial Comedian. It was necessary to switch to digital, it cost a lot of money, but the price of the film also approached astronomical indicators. Therefore, we sold my wife's apartment and bought the first Sony 1000 digital camera in Perm for half of the money. Thus, there was a history of resistance between society and our dream to make movies. In the end, we won.

Among the kitchen conversations of 1995, there came an idea to make a documentary film festival that would emphasize the aesthetic platform on which my friends and I worked. Then I was engaged in theoretical research and wrote the article «Time in the documentary film.» This is still the highest achievement of my IQ. Tarkovsky once said that cinema is a preserved time, but he never was engaged in theory, and I wanted to go further. I laid out time for the physical — time of Euclidean geometry, and nonlinear- emotional one, which forms differently, and then looked at their ratios and projections onto each other.

By that time, after the festivals, I had a wide network of contacts, I was a fairly well-known director, whose career was to end somewhere in France or Germany, as happened with many of my colleagues. And if not for our festival, it would have happened. Having made Flahertiana, we became trapped: we wanted to develop this story. Now we are holding a real festival under the Charter of the international festival movement: with the participation of an international jury of at least five people, with a competitive program, a prize fund, one of the largest in the world.

The name was suggested by Russian cinema expert Naum Kleiman: he said that «Nanuk from the North» by Robert Flaherty is a long observation, a real hero in a real situation, in a word — almost a documentary, «Flahertian» movie. And this is precisely the way to call our festival: in a word, not Russian, not English, but beautiful and unique.

Thanks to the festival, my colleagues and I stayed here. All events of the festival end with relationships, collective energy and as a result with the support of the industry. The main task of Flahertiana is the development of the documentary film industry in the European space. So that we would see people, not propaganda, and wouldn't make enemies of each other. It is a noble task, and the end of the process of its solution is not visible.