One of the things I love about covering film from around the world is you get to watch what happens when a film culture explodes without any rules. When an industry is just emerging nobody really knows what works yet and so all bets are off and just about anything can happen. Russia, obviously, has a very long film history but it is only relatively recently - hello, Night Watch - that producers there realized that they could make good money producing populist films and the industry has exploded in the midst of that realization. A common trend, even in the populist stuff, however, has been that underlying Russian stoicism. These are serious people with a difficult history and that's been reflected even in their pop culture - in much the same way that kid's cartoons in Japan are frequently post-apocalyptic - but there are signs that's beginning to change. Recent releases have included slapstick, Zucker Brothers style fare, the street racing flick we linked to last week, and regular Twitch correspondent Andrey has just passed along the trailer for We Are From The Future, a time hopping adventure featuring a quartet of young, college aged Russians thrown back in time to the midst of World War II. Sure, it's purely pop fluff but it looks to be well made pop fluff and I'm curious to see how these more commercial urges are going to work themselves out. You'll find the trailer in the Twitch Player below the break.
