How to Save a Dead Friend

Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, 2022, 103'

When at 16 years of age Marusya meets Kimi, she is convinced that her life has already come to a halt: the existential anxiety and self-destructive impulses, marked on her arms, find a dark mirror in the boy by whose side she will remain until the last moment. Neither love nor music, alcohol, or drugs will save the two, and not even cinema, which in the hands of the film director becomes an instrument of survival and testimony, at first as a game, afterwards as a necessity.

Made with footage filmed over twelve years, edited at a breathless pace, the film is a dizzying plunge into an abyss from which getting out unharmed is not easy: many of the companions of the director-heroine will not make it - some commit suicide, some OD, some die in an accident. This serves as a testimony to the torment of a generation that experienced loss in an age of radical transformation and impossible readjustment. How to save a dead friend, a shocking directorial debut, is one of the most intimately personal films of the year, but also one of the most lucid and saddest in depicting the atmosphere of an entire country through the malaise, conflicts, and tensions of lost youth.

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Local Time

  • Timezone: America/New_York
  • Date: 06 Nov 2022
  • Time: 15:00

Location

Cinema La Compagnia
Cinema La Compagnia - Via Camillo Cavour, 50/R, 50121 Florence
Marusya Syroechkovskaya

Organizer

Marusya Syroechkovskaya

Marusya Syroechkovskaya is a Moscow-born award-winning filmmaker and visual artist. She studied filmmaking at the School for Documentary Film in Moscow and received her MA in Film Directing at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Her student short, Exploration of Confinement was qualified for the 2013 Academy Awards. Her works were also selected in a number of other international film festivals.

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