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This documentary on difficult adolescents, broadcast on television on Tuesday October 29 and watched by sociologist Anna Colin Lebedev, provides an uncompromising look at the excesses running through Russian society, steeped in a virile and offensive nationalism supported without reservation. by the Orthodox Church.
On Father Boris’s farm, in the Perm region, 1,500 km east of Moscow, the paths of young Nikita, 13, who has barely arrived, and Zakhar, a Roma from Crimea, from two years his senior, a regular at the place. They live there, in this Orthodox re-education center, among around thirty kids forgotten by God. For four long years, between 2018 and 2022, director Salomé Hévin filmed these teenagers as they move towards adulthood. Through their daily lives, the history of Russia emerges, marked by heightened patriotism and the invasion of Ukraine, in Younosta documentary both tender and harsh, broadcast on October 29 on France 2.
Sociologist Anna Colin Lebedev, specialist in Russia and author of Never Brothers? Ukraine and Russia: a post-Soviet tragedy (Seuil, 2022), speaks of it thus to Liberation :
«Younost, a Russian youth is a film which succeeds in what many works are failing to do at the moment: giving a sense and understanding of Russian society in all its complexity and in all its ambiguity, without complacency, but without ever renouncing the humanity of the characters. . The adults shown in the film are often harsh, abusive, radical, and yet the director manages to capture their paradoxical desire to do good for the children they supervise. Domination and care, ideology and abandonment, solitude and affection coexist in the film. THE
Belgium
