The works of filmmaker and artist Marusya Syroechkovskaya move between personal intimacy and political commentary. Her films combine personal experiences with collective memories and deal with the realities of today’s Russia – a context in which personal freedom and artistic expression are under increasing pressure. They deal with feelings of limitation and uprootedness as well as moments of resistance and self-assertion.
Marusya Syroechkovskaya works with a precise documentary methodology, which she interweaves with an independent visual language. Her student short film Exploration of Confinement (2013) already revealed her keen sense of social and psychological spaces and laid the foundation for her further cinematic work.
Her debut feature documentary How to Save a Dead Friend (2022) shows her talent for combining formal rigor with poetic sensitivity: Everyday gestures, intimate conversations and harsh realities merge into a multi-layered cinematic mesh that makes the political urgency of its themes palpable with delicate sensitivity. The film was shown at over 35 international festivals, including Cannes and DOC NYC, and received a nomination for the European Film Awards.
In her works, the filmmaker explores the boundaries between individual and collective narration, between the visible and the invisible, between memory and the immediate present. Her films function simultaneously as documents and reflections, they bear witness to the fragility and endurance of human experience and create visual spaces that resonate long after the end of the projection.