How to Save a Dead Friend

  • Marusya Syroechkovskaya
  • Sweden, Norway, France, Germany
  • 2022
  • 103 min
  • Dutch Premiere
  • Best of Fests

Marusya Syroechkovskaya is a suicidal teenager when she meets troubled Kimi Morev. She knows right away that she has found a kindred spirit. “He had scars on his wrists and he knew every single Joy Division song by heart,” she says in the voice-over of her personal debut film. But where love gives her a new perspective, he fights his demons with more and more drugs. So Syroechkovskaya focuses her ambitions on recording the loss of her loved one.

How to Save a Dead Friend, which has won awards at festivals including Visions du Réel in Switzerland, is more than a portrait of a hopeless drug addict. Syroechkovskaya shows how many of her contemporaries are struggling with childhood trauma and a lack of prospects. Drugs and suicide take a heavy toll among Russian millennials. “Life is merciless,” Morev concludes, after he’s locked up in a state hospital for addicts.

Credits

  • 103 min
  • color
  • DCP
  • Spoken languages: Russian
  • Subtitles in: English
Director
Marusya Syroechkovskaya
Production
Ksenia Gapchenko / Docs Vostok, Mario Adamson / Sisyfos Film Production
Co-production
Anita Norfolk for Folk Film, Alexandre Cornu for Les Films du Tambour de Soie
Cinematography
Marusya Syroechkovskaya, Kimi Morev
Editing
Qutaiba Barhamji

IDFA history

2022
Dutch Premiere
Best of Fests
2020
Supported with €17500 for Classic: Production & postproduction
2019
Round Table Pitch

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IDFA history

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