Journalist turned writer/director Demitri Zujew delves into the depths of morality and power in his impressive debut Crease (Залом). A film much more concerned with raising questions (a fraught act in modern day Russia) than providing pat answers, Zujew has crafted his societal concerns into a deeply emotional short that channels years of his observations of conflict, hostility and a dehumanising winner takes all indoctrination, into a disturbing tale of ‘proper socialization’. The dark undertones of Crease are not only hidden behind the assumed innocence of school children but are also cloaked under the self-congratulatory monologue their boastful principal dazzles a local TV crew with in a nearby classroom. The film’s significant message resonates brightly, with Zujew’s stylistic, aesthetic and narrative choices constructing a multifaceted story of deception, isolation and victimisation. To accompany today’s premiere of Crease, we invited Zujew to join us to discuss the importance of representing “strong eat the weak” culture for what it is, the challenges of filmmaking once Russia invaded Ukraine, and his use of origami as a beautifully potent narrative symbol.
The initial concept of Crease began from real life experiences right? Can you please go into more detail about the observations which sparked this idea?
It wasn’t born out of any particular story or event, and it is not autobiographical, so I can’t really tell you a harrowing real-life story and pinpoint the birth of the film right there. This was more of a slowly rolling snowball of feelings, situations, people, memories and thoughts I had growing up and living my everyday life. This indifference, hostility, the “strong eat the weak” culture I have witnessed many times and wearing many faces, it runs like a thread through the tapestry of the whole society’s mentality. People are always trying to establish who’s more powerful and who’s in charge and then demonstrate their power. Strive to become the predator, fear becoming the prey. Such is the nature of a country that exists in a very strict vertical power design combined with severe atomization of society. The more I encountered this, the more it bothered me. I tried to dive into my past to find that point in time where we start to soak all this in. School seemed the only right answer. This is the place we first encounter other children who may have already developed that mentality through their parents. But we also encounter the state and its workings and philosophies through teachers, principals, even words in textbooks because 98% of schools in Russia are state-run.
This indifference, hostility, the “strong eat the weak” culture I have witnessed many times and wearing many faces, it runs like a thread through the tapestry of the whole society’s mentality.
Before Crease, I actually wrote a feature that this film later came out of. While working on that script, I did extensive research, collecting and reading hundreds of real-life stories, interviews and snippets, as well as research and science papers on the issue, with real life data and psychological analysis. Instead of trying to take out a scene from the feature script or to do it with exactly the same characters, I followed the feeling, the idea and the essence of what I wanted to talk about. So Crease was born as an independent story, but one that had key themes of the big one.
I want to hear more about the themes of your film – deception, isolation, power. How did you then go about developing these into this school set story of the strong preying on the weak playing out in concert with the principal’s TV interview?
You can start right at the title. The ‘creases’ and ‘folds’ happen throughout the entire story. While Maxim is trying to fold a piece of paper into something vaguely close to what his brother is capable of, he himself is being ‘creased’ by his peers. At the same time, they are all being ‘folded’ in a certain way by the system and mentality which the principal represents. But she is not immune to that as well, as she in turn is being ‘folded’ again by orders of her higher-ups. She literally ‘folds’ children into the shape of a letter V in the opening shots of the film because she has been told to do so by her ‘folders’. And even at home, the whole of Maxim’s family is experiencing a major life ‘crease’ as their father has left for war and their future is now in turmoil.
She is the embodiment of the entire system that has only one decision for every problem — do the bare minimum, sweep the rest under the rug and pretend that everything is fine, because “you can never be too careful”.
The concept of the interview and the entire structure of the film have been born out of the fact that appearances are very important in Russian culture. To the point where it replaces the true essence of things. I wanted to expose that and clash everything she says during the interview with what actually happens to the kids. She is the embodiment of the entire system that has only one decision for every problem — do the bare minimum, sweep the rest under the rug and pretend that everything is fine because “you can never be too careful”. We don’t have issues, we only have achievements. We’re not going to admit it and try to work on it and heal ourselves, we will keep it inside where it will continue poisoning us.
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And the isolation just seeps through the cracks of human disconnection that is being fed by everything that is happening. Maxim grows farther from Petya as his mother is left alone and pushes him to take more responsibility for his brother. Nina is concerned only with statistics, exceptional school ratings, accolades, which mean her safety from the higher-ups and the firm standing of her position, isolating herself from issues that may make her crumble. Everyone who’s different, who’s not playing along with the ‘cool kids’’ games gets isolated and thrown into the circle rather than being a safe part of its radius.
With this film I wanted to talk about the big through the small. To illustrate how disastrous things can grow out of invisible ones. Things that no one wants to look at and that are considered the norm. How they scale from ‘child’s play’ into international catastrophes. How everything’s connected and keeps repeating itself. So the school and the people in and around it, for me, have acted as a microcosm and a metaphor for the entire society and all the movements in it.
The three protagonists, Maxim, Petya and principal Nina, all fulfil significant functions within the story. How did you cast those key roles and subsequently work with the actors to elicit their best performances? Also, how challenging was it to work with such a large cast of child actors?
I cast Khelga Filippova, our incredible actress who played the principal, almost immediately after watching a video of her reading the excerpt from the script. She had the same steel voice and appearance as the principal of my own school all those years ago who I imagined when writing this character. Every Russian child had a teacher or principal like her at some point. Khelga is a professional with a capital P, and she nailed the character after only about an hour of discussing her with me. It felt like we had a month of rehearsals, but we didn’t. The day with her was a breeze.
While casting the kids, I decided to host a live casting/improv session. There, I divided everyone into ‘threes’, and each group had boys who were auditioning for the main kids’ roles. I then presented them with a series of situations that were close to the situations of the film emotionally and asked them to ‘live inside’ a bit. Platon Kuzmich (as Maxim), Arseny Inyutin (as Petya) and Dmitrii Bashniak (as Igor) naturally surfaced to the top. We read the script together, talked about the story, discussed their characters and their thoughts and ideas. It was crucial for me to instill a feeling in them that they are the auteurs of the film together with me, because they channel their inner selves into the characters and that is as great an input into the final result as any. This was basically my main approach. I didn’t want them to perform a certain way like we often do with adult actors. I just needed to be sure that they feel the character and understand certain crucial points of the story. Then, when we hit the set, I did everything to create the most comfortable and inviting atmosphere for them to fail and bring the true life of the characters from the inside.
It was crucial for me to instil a feeling in them that they are the auteurs of the film together with me, because they channel their inner selves into the characters and that is as great an input into the final result as any.
The actual shooting was challenging for all of them. From the physically taxing takes of running through the school’s corridors again and again to all the technicalities and emotional pressure of the gym scenes to internalizing and conveying big things through subtle performances. One of the things I decided early on was to shoot chronologically so my actors could better inhibit their characters and so that the story would unfold for them as it’s supposed to. This paid off on the day when we shot the final scenes in the apartment. Platon and Arseny already had all the emotional baggage of the story inside of them. They walked in the shoes of Maxim and Petya and arrived at this point at the same time as them. I won’t lie — the final shot of the film, the one that has Maxim go through a realization of everything that happened that day, was hard to do. I cleared the room and hid behind a closet so our actor wouldn’t see anyone, except his little brother sitting there folding origami figures. It took a while. We had 10-15 minute takes uncut, but we got there and this was an important breakthrough for Platon, our actor, as well.
As for working with such a large cast of kids, it’s actually really fun, but they are not going to stand there and wait for you to figure your shit out. Especially when we were shooting scenes at the gym, their energy just burst everywhere. It was a challenge to control them and make them ready for each take, but one that my incredible 1st AD Alisa Stepanova and our acting coach Pavel Golubev absolutely nailed. Though not without losing their voices more than once.
Crease’s composition and colour palette impact heavily on the story. What drove the focus on greys and blues and the decision to shoot in 4:3? What was your gear set up to capture the visual aesthetic you wanted?
The 4:3 aspect ratio was actually suggested by my DP, Natalia Butova. It was a brilliant suggestion, as this aspect ratio helped to bring forward the trapped feeling I wanted to communicate. To make everyone seem like they are in a box, to show high ceilings that weigh down on our characters and to play with the minimalist geometry of the school and other locations that we were shooting in. Every shot and scene was storyboarded before we stepped on set and composition was indeed very important for me. I wanted to avoid the shaky handheld camera as much as possible and strived for each frame to use composition as a language, to communicate what we envision for it to communicate and not be a visual improv left to chance. For the image itself to be a part of the storytelling.
One other thing that was important for me with visual language was to give lots of attention to detail through macro shots. This decision was made to tell the story ‘from the inside out’ through subjective feelings and perceptions of the characters, who are still children. Even the smallest unnoticeable detail can become large and have great meaning for a child. That is why close-ups and extreme close-ups have become key details that carry emotional weight, and we tried to incorporate that as a recurring visual element throughout the film and let the audience feel what the characters felt.
So gear-wise, the thing we used the most was actually an old trusty tripod. Also, the classic Steadicam and a rickshaw rig for some of the running scenes. And the camera itself was Alexa Mini recording in Opengate ARRIRAW with a 4:3 cache to get the max quality possible with Zeiss Ultra Primes attached. So nothing fancy. The colour was actually not set in stone, and we experimented with it quite a bit in post, but I think eventually, and rather subconsciously, the gym itself had spread its feeling and palette on the entire film. It ended up being such an emotionally charged place that it just informed the look of the entire film.
This decision was made to tell the story ‘from the inside out’, through subjective feelings and perceptions of the characters, who are still children. Even the smallest unnoticeable detail can become large and have great meaning for a child.
Russia in 2022 was undergoing a lot of change. How did this impact the production?
Well, it delayed it for more than half a year because I was shocked and appalled by the war that broke out in February of 2022. The ugliness and complete insanity of it all were devastating. Almost the whole year after was a blur. I felt lost and couldn’t bring myself to do anything. The shoot that was planned for May – June never happened. Finally, in November, I felt that this film needed to be born now because that was the least I, as a storyteller, could do to push against all the madness that was happening.
During pre-production, we also had some people decline our offer to participate because of the subject matter and them not wanting to be associated with a film like that in the future out of fear of it impacting their careers. And, of course, my producers told everyone that we were shooting “just a film about kids at school” to avoid any unexpected roadblocks that could’ve been easily put in front of us out of the same fear by anyone who owned resources that were out of our control, like locations and all that.
Securing permission to shoot in schools is never easy. How did you manage to find and lock down your locations, especially given what I imagine is the contentious nature of the story for those in charge?
Indeed, schools in Russia are considered as places of special importance and everything that can happen in a school, except the current education process, has to be approved by the authorities. Which takes months. If you want to shoot for free, it is also now required to submit an actual script to the Ministry of Education so they can read it and approve or ban you from filming based on the contents of your story. I knew that we had no chance there. So I had to swallow the hefty price tag and go through a location manager who made all of that possible fast and easy (oh what an expensive ‘miracle’).
The gym that you see in the film was actually not a part of the school we shot in. It is a separate standing gym located in a different part of the city that hosts championships and regular sports classes. The owner of the place turned out to be an ex-TV operator who loved cinema and, after talking with him, he agreed to help us and was very generous. The location that gave us the most headaches was the boys’ apartment. We just couldn’t find the right one and were searching even as the production was rolling. I had a very particular apartment layout in mind and nothing fit, so in the end, I decided to go full indie and use my parent’s place. Storyboards had to be redone and scenes re-blocked as this apartment had a completely different geometry. But in the end, it worked out quite well, so everything you see on screen is actually the place I grew up in. Countless times I entered the same door when returning home from school, walked down that corridor to the kitchen and the boys’ room was actually my own, the one where I played with toys, a PlayStation and did my homework.
The confrontation in the gym where the children circle Petya is such a strong scene. Could you take us through the practicalities of shooting that, especially given the heightened emotions, violence and 360 staging of it?
This scene was shot over three days. The location had huge windows, which was a plus, but the area outside was unsuitable to place large lights. Which locked us into relying on natural light that was coming through those windows 95% of the time. As I discovered later, those days in December turned out to be the shortest light days of the entire year. We literally had 5–6 hours of usable time in a day. So we arrived on set early, got prepared and waited for the exposure to hit the least acceptable levels and then immediately would start shooting. At the end of the day, we did the same — rolled until the last ounce of exposure was still available for us.
The gym scenes were not as taxing on our cast physically but were much harder emotionally. There, for the first time, we introduced direct violence and, amidst loud and violent action, it was important for me that my actors convey emotions in a subtle and nuanced way. For them, it was truly a challenge. Arseny, who played Petya, had to take breaks because his emotional protection would kick in and make him start smiling after one or two takes of an entire crowd verbally (and later physically) abusing him. We were especially careful with that, and I repeated consistently that this is not reality and we are just acting it out. Other kids also couldn’t sustain the needed levels of aggression for long, and as I’ve seen later in our BTS photos, there were lots of hugs on set just to compensate for everything. Overall, patience was paramount as I couldn’t push my child actors too hard in such an emotionally fragile setup.
There, for the first time, we introduced direct violence and, amidst loud and violent action, it was important for me that my actors convey emotions in a subtle and nuanced way.
This did not play well with our light situation and schedule though. At a certain point during the shoot, it became apparent that we were running out of time and this couldn’t be ignored. So I had to start cutting shots right there. Some of the more technically impressive shots were thrown away (we had a 360-degree POV shot of Petya, for instance) as they required takes to nail them, and we had only so much time left.
After two intense days of shooting, we arrived at a point when available light had run out like sand in an hourglass. The only issue was that we still had a number of shots that absolutely could not be discarded or the continuity and story would fall apart. And I had to leave on a trip that could not be cancelled. So, a few days later, I spent six hours in front of my laptop with a camera feed on the screen being transmitted via Zoom, while my 1st AD Alisa would run around the set with her phone out of which my voice spoke to the actors and DP and everyone else. In the wrap photo, our small crew is posing with Alisa holding her phone that displays my tiny face on it.
There’s an eerily dark atmosphere of the principal’s self-aggrandising responses contrasted with the on-screen actions of the children – was that juxtaposition something you found in the edit? How did you arrive at the right balance of how much of her speech to include?
I’m glad that you felt this way about her while watching. That juxtaposition was there from the very beginning as I was writing and was intended to play into the overall theme. I wanted her to sound like a pamphlet that is being read out loud from a teleprompter, riddled with hard-to-pronounce formal words and sentences akin to a paragraph from a legal contract. She was to talk and talk and talk until we, as the audience, couldn’t take it anymore. And only about the positives in contrast with what is happening to her students just a few stories down. So, while I was writing, I specifically connected many of her phrases to certain moments in the boys’ story and did an edit of sorts right in the script.
What we discovered in post was that I had kinda overdone it. After a rough cut was assembled, it became clear that we had too much of her. So we had to start cutting her lines and entire chunks of them. The thing was, some of the shots weren’t designed this way, so we ran into a wall in some places where we could not use a take I liked because the movement continuity wouldn’t match. Or we couldn’t remove an important line and had to find ways to work around that. In a way, her part of the story formed itself and even influenced the flow of the boys’ story. I learned a valuable lesson there: that you shouldn’t be too strict and rely too much on doing things exactly the way you wrote them. And to do more coverage, of course.
I wanted her to sound like a pamphlet that is being read out loud from a teleprompter, riddled with hard-to pronounce formal words and sentences akin to a paragraph from a legal contract.
The reveal of the brothers’ relationship is an added dispiriting gut punch of a twist to this already dark tale. Was that element present from the beginning? How did it come into fruition and develop?
I knew from the start that Petya was going to be Maxim’s brother. In plain storytelling terms, I had to raise the stakes high for Maxim and put him under immense pressure while simultaneously presenting him with an impossible choice — to protect his brother and risk joining him or to abandon him and remain in safety, but at what cost? It just wouldn’t feel real and true if that was just some random boy he ran into for the first time. It was also important in order to show how, by choosing not to act, to look away, to stay in the comfort of the majority, we are allowing this mentality to enter us and gradually, bit by bit, consume our soul. And how hard it is to resist this even when your little brother’s safety is at stake. But the most significant reason for this was that I do believe that we are not doomed to live in darkness forever, and the final scene contains a key that opens a door that can lead us out of it. Maxim had to end up in the quietness of that room alone with his brother to arrive at the doorstep.
In the final scene, the film’s title and the recurring symbolism of origami are at their most powerful. Could you talk to us about deciding to draw things to a close with this elegant yet simple bookending motif?
I was always fascinated and drawn to working through small details. A simple thing that has no meaning for someone can mean the world to another person. And there are films that use that so powerfully that it just destroys you (in a good way) and then stays with you forever, like the final scenes of Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain or Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love.
As I’ve just said, that blood-stained frog is the key. It is a connection between them that even the strongest force of pressure can’t completely destroy. Because it comes from a place of purity and love. A connection that confronts society’s disconnection. It triggers Maxim to realise everything. And at that pinnacle moment, the kind and bright side of his soul can no longer be suppressed and is bursting outside. And the fact that he can still access it and feel the pain gives us hope. A hope that everything can be changed, that this darkness that consumes society has not yet triumphed completely. It is a bright ray of light that shines through it.
Given the political and social issues that took place during the production of your film, how did it feel representing them on screen? Were you at all concerned about ruffling feathers?
I have wanted to talk about this for a long time, as the initial inspiration for the story came to me as far back as 2018. So while we were doing it, I didn’t have any concerns. All I cared about was to make the film in the most honest way possible and stay true to what I initially wanted to say. You can’t let fear and self-censorship consume you, or else your voice gets distorted and, pun intended, ‘creased’ into a shape that you can’t even recognise after.
So, to be honest, we didn’t even get a chance to ruffle anything. I obviously wanted people in Russia to see the film, as it is closest to them and what they go through day by day. We submitted it to major film festivals here, but they all rejected us. I’m not going to make any conclusions, but it seemed very unusual as by the time we were submitting, we already had international selections. And, prior to 2022, any Russian short that had a number of selections around the world was championed by the local film scene. But we tried nevertheless.
You can’t let fear and self-censorship consume you, or else your voice gets distorted and, pun intended, ‘creased’ into a shape that you can’t even recognise after.
As you mentioned earlier, Crease has its roots in the feature Boys you wrote beforehand. How’s that moving along and what other projects are you working on?
In the summer of last year, I submitted that feature script to the only screenwriting/directing lab in the country — Lenfilm Debut. And out of more than half a thousand submissions, it was picked for the finals. I did not get into the lab, and honestly, I wasn’t hoping to. After all, the feature hit harder and on a larger scale than the short. The laws have become stricter than ever, and people who are trying to speak about difficult topics can do that only by transferring their stories into the past (USSR or earlier) or trying to use very heavy metaphors.
As for my current projects, I now channel my newfound energy into two stories. One is a short film that is rooted heavily in genre but still, at its core, tackles a painful issue that we as a society have to live with every day. The other is a feature script that is genre as well (although a different one), which is a gritty exploration of the cost of human life in an age of exponentially speeding up technology, which makes people more redundant and renders them a mere resource rather than unique human beings. Let’s hope that we’ll meet again to talk about one of them sooner rather than later!
