Marusya Syroechkovskaya: How to Save a Dead Friend
Filmed by Kimi Morev and Marusya Syroechkovskaya
Edited by Qutaiba Barhamji
Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, 103 mins., 2022
Kimi passed away on the night of November 4th, 2016.
He wasn’t just my lover and husband, he was also my best friend, my dreamy soul mate. But he was giving up — on his future, dreams, his looks even…he was sinking more and more into self-destruction, and it was hard for me to see how the person I love so much destroys himself. He didn’t accept any help from anybody, it was impossible to get through to him, and the only thing I could do was just to be with him.
How do you keep someone who does his best to disappear? I wanted to be there for him, but the whole situation hurt me a lot as well. Then my camera provided me the distance I needed, making everything looked not real. Maybe filming for me became the same as drugs became for Kimi—an escape from reality, from everything that didn’t work out for us. This experience made me think about the nature of film as a medium that captures time and keeps everything and everyone in one collective space. It reminded me of watching old wartime newsreel footage and realizing that although these people died a long time ago, somehow, they are still here, alive in the footage. Was it maybe the way to save Kimi? Or maybe I could save him if he somehow becomes music? Maybe scanning Kimi’s body with the sonification app VOSIS and turning it into music is also a way of keeping him and letting him stay for as long as possible. In the end, music and his poems are is what left of him.
I also wanted to save the time, space, and things that formed me and Kimi as we were growing up, and HOW TO SAVE A DEAD FRIEND is also a tribute to films of Gregg Araki and Harmony Korine; artwork of David LaChapelle; to lots and lots of music: from post-punk and grunge to emo and witch house; to Windows Movie Maker transitions, early web aesthetics, and internet forums – back when the internet wasn’t yet controlled by corporations and censored by the government, when it was a place where you could freely express yourself and find belonging, occupying your dial-up for hours.
How do you find a language for the film that spans 12 years and wasn’t meant to become a film while it was shot? The idea was to give a feeling of how it was to grow up in the 00s, to dive into sunny summer days and kaleidoscope of formats, pulsating visuals, and sounds coming from all directions.
As time passes, as we see a chain of similar New Year addresses by presidents, the winter dark days take hold, isolating people from each other in their apartments. Our immediate outside world, once so enticing now becomes more and more violent, with less music and fewer friends around. Colors become muted, less saturated; cuts become longer. And Kimi is fading away into the darkness.
When you lose someone close — someone who knew you well — part of your story disappears along with him. All that is left to do is to pick up the remaining memories before they turn to digital dust.
