The first feature film of young Valeria Gai Germanika, released in 2008, won a special prize of the judges in the contest "Golden Camera" on Cannes Film Festival. The film's plot lays around Katya, Zhanna and Vika, who are studying 9th year in school and are eagerly waiting for the disco, but many things in their lives change until this disco like fights, first sex and relationships with parents.
The themes that Germanika was able to touch on by this film, such as youth and elder generation gap, child abuse and adolescence were shown very clearly and professionally. This job can be seen from the narration of the film, where the viewer sees the problems of growing up of Katya (Polina Filonenko), Zhanna (Agniya Kuznetsova) and Vika (Olga Shuvalova) from the perspective of their peer, not a usual adult. This idea is explained by the negative identity, which is described by girls perceiving their parents and any other adult as their personal enemy because they do not want to be as adults. This way the girls identify themselves as young people who are unlike these violent and coward adults are trying to live their lives the way they want and enjoy it without any restraints. As a result, they are "young, brave and smart" girls. As an instance, unlike adults, girls want to stay loyal to each other and as a result very hastily promise each other to stay together until they grow up. Germanika's choice of the way of narration eventually played the most significant role in the delivery of this key idea of the girls' identity.
The story of each girl's entering the adult world shows vividly the suffering of teens during the post-Soviet Russia. As one of these sufferings, Germanika discusses in her film the generation gap. The very first scene in Katya's house shows her coming back from school while her parents are waiting for guests who do not come, but they still were hoping they will come. After that, we see a close-up scene of Katya looking at her belly with piercing that she would like to have, but her father comes into the room and beats her up until Katya starts crying and laying on the floor. It seems that for post-Soviet youth and teens having a piercing was a normal idea. However, parents due to their Soviet background and being a Soviet person still had such negative reactions to already usual things like a piercing. Moreover, as a result, in the film, this Soviet background and absence of progressive mindset lead to even greater misunderstanding between teens and parents, resulting in parents staying out of the growing process of their daughters because of their attitude. This negative attitude towards social progress is heated up by the follow-front and pan left shots, which prepare the viewer to something shocking like the scene where Katya is being beaten by her father while her mother just stands still looking at this process. The very first possible reason for the indifference of her mother that comes to the mind of any viewer might be that mother just got used to this kind of scenes because it happens very often. This again already tells a lot about parents' mindset and fear of losing control over their child, which is clearly a result of their staying out of the growing process of their children.
Another great moment of the film is a smooth work of operator and director because this collaboration resulted in an effect of presence in the moment. As Julia Vassilieva, author of the academic articel "Becoming-Girl" in the New Russian Cinema" says, "Germanika delivers an insider, cinema vérité - style perspective on the daily functioning of this universe" (p.63) In other words, Germanika's decision to reject the usage of any camera rails and go with the good old hand-held camera method, along with the decision to shoot the film in the region of Moscow where just that type of marginal group lived, by which I mean not the rich New Russians or any middle class group, but the ones who were not able to "win over" the situation of post-Soviet Russia, became a key to delivery of the film's idea. Here Germanika's experience in the documentary film helps her to portray the real life of teens and adults that could not accept the reality and improve her skills as a director. I think the scene when Katya just jumps out of her room's window to the disco and operator, the best operator at that time Alisher Hamidchodzhaev, also runs following her great, thereby creating this follow-back shot (FBS) with shaking hands and taking the viewer with Katya to the school disco is one of the greatest ones in the film. Deliberate and at that moment of time unusual for youth film production choices eventually made the film as much honest and unexpectedly thought provocative.
I think the main achievement of Everyone Dies But Me is its bravery and realistic style of narration which inevitably led to the perception of the adolescents and teens as a pretty serious and attention-deserving theme and teens being just as important to the society. Showing the old decayed system in terms of oppressive schools and misunderstanding between parents and children, the film succeeds in showing the ugliness of humanity in post-Soviet Russia.
Review of Everybody Dies But Me
