Balabanov

The book Balabanov continues the Seans magazine’s “Black” director-focused book series. The volume is divided into several sections and offers a detailed account of the life and work of one of the most important Russian filmmakers of the 1990s and 2000s, Alexei Oktyabrinovich Balabanov. The first and largest section, “Biography,” is written by film critic Maria Kuvshinova, deputy editor-in-chief of Seans magazine. Conversations with Alexei Balabanov, Sergei Astakhov, Anzhelika Nevolina, Svetlana Pismichenko, Alexei Poluyan, Denis Gorelov, and Vyacheslav Kuritsyn, as well as the first interviews with Sergei Selyanov and Nadezhda Vasilieva, were conducted in the spring of 2009. Interviews with Alexander Simonov, Nikita Mikhalkov, Lyubov Arkus, Vladimir Plyatskovsky, Yakov Gordin, Anastasia Karimullina, Daria Petrova, and Alla Tyaglova were recorded in the summer and autumn of 2013. The sections “Filmography” and “Parts of Speech” feature essays by Anton Dolin, Vyacheslav Kuritsyn, Andrei Plakhov, Ksenia Rozhdestvenskaya, Yuri Saprykin, Maxim Semelyak, and other prominent critics, devoted to the director’s work. The Appendix includes Alexei Balabanov’s final screenplay, My Brother Died.