Dreams about Putin

In repressive regimes, dreams constitute a sort of last space of freedom. A strange, involuntary freedom, to which Nastia Korkia and Vlad Fishez pay a wonderful tribute by photographing the Russian collective unconscious, sadly occupied and preoccupied by the incumbent President. This search for an interiorisation of public personae is not new – John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Barack Obama have already been the subject of artists’ projects – but Dreams about Putin explores the theme through the clever use of roughness in creating images with the video game tool Unreal Engine. The fragmentary animation perfectly expresses the blurry representation of dream memories and enhances the surrealist, absurd situations described by the witnesses. Something that should be in contrast with the several pieces of archive footage that Korkia and Fishez intersperse in the film, but which is surprisingly not the case: the glorification of the little tzar in pathetic pseudo-heroic setups – flying with storks or spearfishing – seems to be so staged and surreal that we actually experience the astonishing continuity between digital manipulation and staged reality. In this way, the found footage anticipates and pre-empts the collective imagination: is this a saturation of that last space of freedom? Not really, because the digital creations underline the reduction of the powerful patriarch to the status of a miserable puppet (of himself), something that is already working in the found footage. Image manipulation can serve power or make fun of it. The last (manipulated) found images of the President in a court behind bars mark the spirit of Dreams about Putin: a therapeutic and liberating film.

Nastia Korkia, Vlad Fishez | BE-HUN-PT 2023 | 30’ | Berlinale 2024 (Woche der Kritik), Bildrausch Filmfest Basel 2024, Fantoche Baden 2024
More Info