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“Limonov: The Ballad,” directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, was screened at the Cannes Film Festival and will be released in the US in September. The screenplay, written by Serebrennikov with Ben Hopkins and Paweł Pawlikowski in an adaptation of Emmanuel Carrère’s 2015 fictionalized biography, tells the story of the poet, writer and Soviet dissident who became a supporter of the revival of the USSR. MT spoke with the director in an exclusive interview.

Kirill Serebrennikov: For me, he was a Russian Joker. A person with several faces who multiple times would die and be reborn in a new body, environment, and nation, starting a new life each time. I never met him.



He was very influential in the 1990s in Russia, the time of my youth. He was attractive — he looked and behaved like a rock star. A lot of young people read , the newspaper he published in the anti-West tradition.

He called himself a Self-[Declared]-Russian-Fascist. I wanted to show how a creative personality becomes a character of war. This can give you an idea about the roots of violence and Russian fascism.

And if you ask how contemporary he is – I would say he is quite contemporary. All of Russian aggression has an example in contemporary history, reflected in what Russia is doing now with its invasion [of Ukraine]. It shows how quickly such things can happen.

Limonov is like a metaphor for Russia. He has a complicated personality, probably a bit romantic, and way too anarchic. He is very contradictory �.

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