Two trends have stood out in recent Russian cinema: growing interest in fairy tales and the rise of regional filmmaking. If the first is often linked to escapism amid war and economic crisis, the second reflects peoples’ demand for cultural self-definition. Many of these films speak in the language of myth, placing children, family, and historical memory at the center.
Five films from different regions
Timir by Nikolai Koryakin follows a boy who, after his mother’s death, moves from Yakutsk to live with the father who had long been absent. In the village he faces his father’s alcoholism and meets a ghost wearing a cap marked “USSR,” who promises to help him contact his mother. Koryakin’s debut won the best director prize at the Winter festival; critics noted its visual precision and turn toward magical realism.
Take and Remember by Baibulat Batullin brings viewers to a Tatar village, where six-year-old Ilkhas spends the summer with his grandparents, unaware that his parents died in a plane crash. Games and comic scenes become a way to postpone the hardest possible conversation about death. The film links its timeless atmosphere with a musical bridge between eras, from Alfiya Avzalova to the group Taraf.
Seven Black Papers by Anatoly and Alan Koliev is set in North Ossetia in 1942. Two brothers hide death notices delivered by the local postman, while their mother waits for news from her husband at the front and tries to see the future through ancient magic. The filmmakers turn a family story into a Gothic fairy tale about war without heroic pathos.
Wolves by Mikhail Kulunakov unfolds in nineteenth-century Altai. The love story of Tokma and Kymyskai leads to violence, escape, and a family trauma passed down to children. The director blends the western and the thriller while reflecting on the roots of cruelty.
In Legends of Our Ancestors by Ivan Sosnin, a journalist from Yekaterinburg encounters the forest spirit Nyulesmurt. He sets out across the Urals, where the mythology of the Khanty and Mansi becomes a way to speak about disappearing languages, names, and cultural memory. The shared motif in all these films is a fairy tale without a guaranteed happy ending, through which regional cinema addresses anxiety, hope, and radical change.