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Ten Years Ago on September 11, 2001…

… I was in a terrible worry: Daniel (my late ex-husband) was coming to Russia on September 13. One, I wasn’t sure if he’d be allowed to fly, and we both missed each other badly. Two – should he be flying, I’d be at the end of my wits until he’d land safely in Sheremetyevo. He did fly, and he was safe, but never since have I been able to stay unsympathetic for people who worry about their dear ones. Needless to say, I have always sympathised immensely with all those people who perished and those who’d lost their parents, spouses, children, and friends…

… I also realised that what my lecturer in Contemporary History said in February had bizarrely come true. And he said, literally, that in about half a year from February 2011 there would be a military action on the part of the United States Armed Forces in Afganistan. And sure it was…

… a few months before that, when I went to St Petersburg in November 2010, I wrote a play for a New Year party at my department. The play was anything but nice: it dealt with the aftermath of the Apocalypse. In January 2011 I began to turn it into a story, and a short prologue was a retelling of a global catastrophe caused by a barely known technician’s pressing a forbidden nuclear button. Around March I got stuck, and the events on September 11 looked like something I had foreseen, in one way or another. And it was scary…

… I have just come back after a week in Yekaterinburg, the capital of the Urals Region, known for having stationed the Russian Royal Family shortly before they were all killed. A book had just come out, stating that the murder of Emperor Nicholas II was practically commissioned by the powers that be, located in the West, that didn’t want Russia to grow in power. For decades, starting with Nicholas II’s reign, people had been fed one story: that Nicholas wasn’t an able governor, and that his murder was forced by the Bolshevist ‘raison d’état‘. Suddenly now the story may turn out to be different.

You surely know about publications that claimed that the tragedy on September 11, 2001 was commissioned by the mysterious World Government that orders the world how to live, and in this case had assisted the U.S. at creating the opportunity to enter the Middle East. It’s very similar to the story of the Russian Emperor, who needed his decline and death, and why. Whether or not this is true, whatever World Governments there are, the outcome is the same: thousands of victims, thousands of losses, yet another Remembrance Day, and a faint hope that ‘nothing like this happens again’.

The problem is, it is the victims families who remember their loved ones. The rest of the world, sadly, remembers the act of terrorism. Consider for a second that we get more of what we focus on. Remembering a deceased person will only save them in time, help us learn and follow their example in being good, professional, human. Constantly remembering about terrorism and someone’s plans to trip you over can only do one thing: to actually trip you over and to have terrorists descend in heaps on your home town.

What is it that we want to remember?

Goethe’s Faust by Alexander Sokurov Wins Venice’s Golden Lion

Whenever my native country’s people win awards and receive accolades, I feel immensely proud and happy. Alexander Sokurov has won the Golden Lion at the 68th Venice International Film Festival for his adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. I am proud and happy.

The film’s official release date is December 8, 2011. You did know it’s my birthday on December 9, didn’t you?

And this is the video of the awards ceremony. The Golden Lion comes at the very end. Sokurov says: “It (the Lion) is so small, and we had to walk such a long way to get it. I am grateful to be living in the cinema. Our film had a truly international cast and crew. At one point we counted people from 38 countries on the set. Grazie“.

An adaptation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s seminal masterpiece marks the end of Sokurov’s cinematographic enquiry into the nature of human power. His previous films studied the notion in the context of the great political, if controversial, figures of the 20th century – Vladimir Lenin of Russia (Taurus), Adolf Hitler of Germany (Moloch), and Emperor Hirohito of Japan (The Sun). Faust, in the words of the film’s producer, Andrey Sigle, “has no particular relevance to contemporary events in the world—it is set in the early 19th century—but reflects Sokurov’s enduring attempts to understand man and his inner forces“.

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