The new video essay ‘A red word is a lie’ is a poetic visual study of contemporary Russia through the metaphor of a symptom.
It is primarily based on personal archival materials from Russia, Germany, and Turkey, representing different alarming traces of
socio-political breakage in ordinary life before and after February 24, 2022.
The starting point of the research is the court case of A. Navalny from 2021, when he returned to Russia from Germany after the poisoning with Novichok.
The devastatingly long announcement of the 'final' verdict is visually juxtaposed with the landscape that drags the viewer down.
Furthermore, such notions as imprisonment in a broader sense and the romanization of violence are being actively
developed through the personal video and sound materials of the author, streams of Russian nongovernmental media,
AI-generated files, and abstracts from fictional and documentary movies.
Apart from that, the color «red» plays a special role, referring to the Soviet and communist heritage
taken outside the initial context and subverted through visual poetics.