On October 25 at 6:00 p.m., as part of Alexander Smolyansky’s “Berlin Encounters” series, the documentary “Kushnir” will be screened. Its protagonist is a brilliant pianist, a talented writer, and a fearless man who openly spoke out against the war.
In 2024, Pavel Kushnir was detained for his anti-war statements online. At the time, his YouTube channel had only five subscribers. While in a Birobidzhan detention center, Kushnir went on a dry hunger strike and died before reaching the age of forty.
The film does not reduce Kushnir’s fate to the story of yet another victim of political repression. The director is primarily interested in Pavel himself: where did this almost completely unknown and utterly lonely man find the resolve to make his moral choice and stand his ground, even when it meant giving his life for it?
Kushnir graduated from the Moscow Conservatory and worked as a soloist with the Philharmonic. He approached music with almost fanatical rigor: hours of practice at the piano sometimes left his fingers bloodied. At the same time, he wrote experimental prose, distributed anti-war leaflets, and seriously dreamed of one day leaving Earth to travel to Mars. In his final videos, he spoke openly about the war and called for resistance against it.
Literary fame held almost no interest for him. Instead of seeking out publishers or participating in literary circles, he filled notebooks with manuscripts and passed them on to friends. Only *Russian Compilation* was published during his lifetime, and it went virtually unnoticed. Kushnir crafted the novel *Noël* as a vast collage of countless foreign voices—ranging from ancient literature to the Beat Generation. Readers began to discover this author only after his death.
Sergei Erzhenkov deliberately refuses to portray his protagonist merely as a victim: “He was as free as a person can possibly be. A force of nature. A rebel. An anarchist.”
To structure the film, the director used an artistic framework that Kushnir himself had developed for his unproduced autobiographical film *Six Weary Souls*. The film is divided into three parts—“The Prophet,” “The Creator,” and “The Rebel.” The musical theme of “The Prophet” is linked to Rachmaninoff, while that of the final “The Rebel” is linked to Scriabin’s “Prometheus.”
The story is pieced together from diary entries, home videos, surviving footage, and accounts from people who knew Pavel. Clean Bandit member Grace Chatto, musicologist Mikhail Kazinik, and journalist Dmitry Volchek share their memories of him. With the family’s permission, the filmmakers used artificial intelligence to reconstruct Kushnir’s voice, which is used to narrate excerpts from his diary.
Filming began thanks to private donations, with most of the initial contributions coming from Russia. For some of the subjects, participating in the film was risky, so the filmmakers had to conceal their names or discard footage that had already been recorded. In Russia itself, the film was screened at unofficial, closed-door showings in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, and Novosibirsk.
The film *Kushnir* received a special mention from the jury of the *Artdocset-2026* competition—“for telling the story that there is no such thing as a small person in this world, especially when it comes to courage and strength of spirit.”
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