Glasnost Film Festival: Against the Current & The Wood Goblin

Against the Current, 27 min.
A Film by Dmitri Delov

A film about ecological crime and how the residents of Kirishi educate themselves to the meaning of citizenship. They are called extremists and "greenies", but they continue to organize protests of a major synthetic protein plant following an ecological disaster that poisoned and killed members of the community.

"We couldn't breathe, we coughed, we itched; we buried our children...but we can't put up with it anymore," a young woman shouts indignantly at a rally. The residents call the illness Bykov's Disease after the factory's founder, who is now a government minister.

The Wood Goblin: Confessions of an Old Man, 17 min.
A Film by Boris Kustov

For 15 years, Alexander Nikolayev has lived alone in the woods with a cat and two dogs, in a house he built himself. He commanded a tank company during World War II and became a local Communist Party chief after the war. Fired from his position after a smear campaign, he went away to live in the woods. As he puts it, he "joined the part of the green world" which he now defends against poachers and woodcutters.