The Fool
Just after this movie was aired on a Russian TV channel, the director of this very same channel lost his job.,Dima Nikitin: We live like animals and die like animals because we are nobodies to each other.,Referenced in Vdud (2017),Spokoynaya noch
Written by Viktor Tsoy
Performed by Kino
Courtesy of Moroz Records,Yuri Bykov's "Durak" ("The Fool" in English) looks as the current state of affairs in Russia. This story of a plumber facing an intractable bureaucracy when he tries to draw people's attention to a precarious apartment building is merely one look into an oligarchic society that's seen little infrastructural and political advancement since the Soviet collapse. Indeed, the city government seems as hopeless as the private citizens. The truth is, none of this should come as a surprise. Boris Yeltsin turned Russia into a kleptocracy. Vladimir Putin stabilized the economy but restored the Soviet-era authoritarianism. Corruption has dominated the country ever since the USSR collapsed (and was certainly widespread in Soviet times).

"The Fool" is mostly an indictment of Putin's Russia, but can be seen as an indictment of any society in which corruption is so ingrained that the citizens practically accept it. Worth seeing.,