Otets is billed as a “poetic-philosophical documentary” – and while the trappings of each one of those qualifiers contains a multitude of sticking points, it somehow manages to deliver on all three. That is no small feat, especially when throwing the powder kegs of contemporary European geopolitics, and familial trauma into the mix; so, writer-director Nataliya Golofastova and her team of editors (Srdjan Fink, Anna Bogolubova and Elja de Lange) should first be commended for making anything coherent out of the spiralling mass of footage and testimony before them.
Perhaps what helped them prevail was the possibility that complexity, contradiction, chaos is partly the point. The sweep of the story – which I saw with a full house at its premiere in Amsterdam on Tuesday, documents the life and beliefs of Sergei Ovsiannikov. Born in Leningrad in 1952 – a year before the death of Stalin – he would later abandon his studies leading to a career in science, to instead become a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Treatise on freedom
Citing passages from A Book about Freedom, which Otets Sergei (Father Sergei) later penned about his formative experiences, Golofastova sets about examining what caused him to take such a risk. Central to this was that the Russian state’s attempts to drill him into submission had the opposite impact. During an early spell in the army, Sergei was imprisoned for disobedience – something which ended up giving him the time and space to formulate theories on what he felt was wrong in his life.
When the prisoners walked to work together, they were followed by a soldier with a gun. Fearsome as that was, after a while, came a realisation that “we are always being followed by such a soldier, only usually he is invisible”. Through force and propaganda, every person in the USSR had to “become your own guard, your own censor” – policing not just what they said, but their inner-dialogues. The real soldier suddenly seemed less of a concern to Sergei than that invisible other.
Having been funnelled into a path to produce a future more acceptable to the state, Sergei was offered a fresh opportunity to find more time and space to think about life, when a professor encouraged him to study Christianity at the Theological Academy. It was officially forbidden at the time, while Stalinist purges had earlier executed and imprisoned members of Orthodox priests. That was not just in living memory, but recent history. But in spite of this, and the protestations of his family (his father struck him in the face, and stopped talking to him for some 10 years after), Sergei took that chance.
In religion, he found an opportunity to explore thoughts and feelings that he had been denying himself, amid a life of self-censorship. He also found the connection to his future wife, who he would take the chance to move to Amsterdam with in the early 1990s – starting a family, and leading an Eastern Orthodox Church in what he saw as a free country.
Throughout the first half of the film, overlapping testimony from those who attended Sergei’s sermons – whether they believed in his god or not – orchestrate a picture of a man imbued with some supernatural will to promote peace and freedom. A relentless champion of liberal democracy, where, as he somewhat naïvely stated “people have differences, then they talk and talk, and reach a compromise which includes everybody”.
In Amsterdam, a city of immigrants from all corners of the Earth, Sergei sought to create a church in the image of this freedom. Accounts from fellow priests and attendees describe a vibrant space where people of every kind – including the director – were welcome, and could seek guidance according to their own needs – every size, shape, race, religion and political persuasion.
These segments, in which the babbling acclaim bleeds into itself to reach a fervent fever pitch, is accompanied by imagery of ecclesiastic art being restored – and several instances of people literally painting a saint while the congregation does something similar figuratively. The problem is, like the church, like the version of freedom he came to be seen as a figurehead of, the man himself was fraught with contradictions. He was human – in the best and worst senses of the term.
And as much as the first half of Otets seems to participate in this placing of Sergei on a pedestal, it also maintains an air of tension – a suggestion that beneath this seemingly benign surface, there is white-hot conflict bubbling beneath the surface. The sounds design of Huibert Boon and the soundtrack by German Popov (aka OMFO) are key components for maintaining this atmosphere – Boon’s cavernous, layered sound editing blurring the lines between our world and the film’s, while Popov’s drawn-out, synthetic soundscape patiently ratchets up an Adam Curtis-esque sense of foreboding.
This provides an audible engine, quietly influencing how we relate to some of the key moments of the movie. When the dam finally bursts, and we are given insight into the totality of Sergei’s behaviours, his daughter sits silently, letting the words she has spoken hang in the air – while the quiet pulse which accompanies bad news, and our darkest moments. Somewhere in there, a babbling child’s voice sounds on repeat, amid in a moment where the film’s innocence died.
The split
Director Golofastova had earlier asked Sergei to be the godfather of her son – something which he had unexpectedly declined with the line, “I am not a good father.” While this left Golofastova feeling hurt, the testimony of his children suggests in some respects, this was not a flippant way of declining something he did not want to do.
Evdokia, his youngest daughter, tearfully recounts the way her parents pushed her to relentlessly “be the best version of yourself”. To realise this, on top of rising early to commence a brutal study schedule, her days were capped by lengthy ballet sessions, homework, and a bed time of 3am. When she began to experience panic attacks, something she describes in detail, she was told to simple “not be stressed”.
Son Aleksey meanwhile recalls the strictness of his father – and how he was essentially left to contend with many questions for himself, that he was too afraid to bring up with his family. After a period of concealing “drink, weapons, porn” in his locker, Aleksey found himself through theatre, (segments of his performances accompany many of the film’s segments to provide artistic illustration of the emotions discussed), only for his father to disagree.
Other segments including the pair and sister Aglaya also mention the disciplinarian streak which their parents still harboured: beatings occurred, “a belt was used”. While it is unclear if that was a regular occurrence or not, it shows that Sergei had cultivated two versions of his own self. And arguably, it shows the limitations of dialogue around freedom itself, even beyond the constraints of the iron curtain.
As much as Sergei and other sources in the film cite his upbringing in Russia, and his ‘inner sniper’ as the reasons he did not live up to his saintly public image at home, he would not be the only parent to have meted out beatings on his children, despite publicly upholding liberal democratic values. Many of those people were not raised by parents corrupted by Stalinism. There is a deeper social failing here – one which the dichotomy of Communism vs. Freedom cannot sufficiently address.
Sergei’s response to the oppression at the hands of the state, as noted in the film, was to essentially retreat from communal ideas of freedom. True freedom, he insisted, did not depend on what a society, or government would permit – but instead came from an inner understanding of self, and working to maximise the potential of that self. His pursuit of an idealised version of his individuality unintentionally led to the creation of an Otets Sergei; a figure who possibly enabled him to publicly divorce himself from early experiences that badly needed addressing, and which leaked out in at home. At the same time, his atomised understanding of ‘freedom’, he ended up enforcing the same rigorous and authoritarian measures on his children, which he had suffered in the USSR, at the hands of the state or his own father. To wax lyrical on the virtues of freedom is one thing, but if we do not consider how those in positions of power – right down to a parent over a child – limits that definition of freedom according to their own biases, every one of us has not only a sniper, but a tyrant inside us.
But further to that, Golofastova’s film also applies this contradiction to a broader society, which for so long has outwardly favoured the art of compromise, but increasingly teeters on the brink of a schism that cannot be mended by talk of individual betterment alone.
The centre cannot hold
Sergei passed away in 2018, four years before Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Speaking on what has occurred since, a contemporary of Otets Sergei laments that the once united congregation is no longer so. While the church itself put out a statement condemning the war, a number of former attendees disagreed – and here the limitation of dialogue for dialogue’s sake becomes bitterly apparent. Freedom cannot hinge on individualism alone – or before long tensions in public, economic and social life will bubble to the surface and impinge upon it. While the fall of the USSR might have briefly opened doors for individual self-discovery, post-Soviet Russia’s conflicts and contradictions have provided a fruitful environment where a distinctly exclusionary brand of ‘freedom’ has taken hold – and it is not something which ends in that nation’s borders, either.
Being able to debate any subject and reach a compromise that works for everyone has long been defended as the great strength of liberal democracy. But as democratic states have sold off or dismantled every facet of social security and public support for short-term economic gains, despite public outcry, it has become clear that more often than not, freedom in the liberal sense serves the market, at the expense of everyone else.
Increasingly desperate people have been left grasping for something or someone to blame. In the Netherlands, as in many countries across the ‘free’ West, that has been immigrants – with emboldened fascist movements beginning to pose ‘legitimate concerns’ in public discourse that cannot yield a compromise which includes everyone, but simultaneously does not alienate the whims of business, because it does not require public taxation to deliver. Concessions on a question as to whether people outside the White Christian majority should have basic human rights are a blatant infringement on the freedom of all those groups – one which will ultimately inhibit their ability to look inwards, and to know and better themselves.
Otets’ imagery also supplies a powerful set of visual signifiers for these struggles – both in society and within Sergei. Again, credit needs to go to the editors, as well as the team of cinematographers (Anna K, Federico Campanale, Victor Bogolubov, and Petros Nousias) for providing a masterclass in composite imagery. In one scene, where a member of Sergei’s congregation discussed the great number of horrific things Sergei had to advise his flock for (he describes it along the lines of “human filth” at one stage), we are given a god’s-eye-view of his coffee cup – which begins to shimmer and ripple beneath a toxic pool from Tarkovsky’s Stalker (a film Sergei apparently loved), before another layered image uses a part of a stage presentation from Aleksey’s theatre troupe, transforming it into a pit of writhing limbs.
Suddenly, within the cup – a humble staple of life in peaceful, democratic Amsterdam, which various people drink from during this film – we find multitudes of humanity. Anguished, frustrated, desperate and often dangerous humanity, tasked with realising and bettering the supreme individual within, but confounded at every turn by wider societal forces we have been told to no longer concern us.
In conclusion
Full disclosure, this is the first (and probably last) time I have been invited to a premiere at the lavish halls of Amsterdam’s historic Tuschinski cinema. But I want to make it clear that amid such splendour – and even with the complimentary shot of vodka and gherkin chaser that followed – I still remain impartial. There are aspects of the film which I would have liked to see fleshed out further – which might have been harder to push the subjects on, but are important to the story being told.
The matter of Sergei’s passing itself is not especially clear – I am not sure the film notes that he died of pneumonia (something I looked up later), and it does not mention that he died with his family around him until the end of the film. To an extent, that is necessary to leave us in the dark about whether he managed to rebuild bridges with his children. But as it appears he did, we are still largely left in the dark as to what extent he took culpability for his actions during their childhood.
Whatever the background of a person, there is undeniably a case for saying the use of a belt to discipline a child is an unforgivable act. For those directly impacted, the lines are inevitably more complicated, and it comes across that to some extent, Sergei did improve. They say he eased off a little in his severity, perhaps seeing what he was doing to them – and not enjoying the parallels he saw with his father – but it is not clear if he ever brought the subject up with them. And beyond a deathbed plea for them to “love one another unconditionally”, there is little to inform us as to what extent he ever managed to adapt his feelings around love and freedom, and to maybe practice what he preached.
At the same time, there is a void here in discussion of the church itself as an institution which has shaped, and limited how freedom is understood in the East and West. Liberation Christians can be found in all denominations around the globe – but the consolidated power of the church has often walked hand in hand with the rich and the powerful, to enable some of human history’s darkest chapters. The Eastern Orthodox Church has not exactly been a champion of LGBT+ rights in Russia in recent years – especially around the infamous law banning “LGBT+ propaganda” (representation) in public forums, or a Russian Supreme Court ruling which defined the global LGBT+ movement as “extremist”.
There may have been difficulties fitting this into a film with a shorter run-time, but it is hard not to feel that a little less about Sergei’s early years might have freed up some space for it in a 90-minute space. But it may also have been that the filmmakers were not quite distant enough from the subject to bring it up. Filmmakers talking about stories and people they are familiar with presents some remarkable opportunities – and that is the case here – but it can also make it challenging to really pursue the most awkward of questions.
Even so, the above is minor in the grand scheme – with Otets giving us more than enough food for thought to draw our own conclusions in these regards. A biography, rather than the portrait of a saint, it does not shy away from showing a man who tried to do good, but who also had failings which that alone does not absolve. And fittingly for such a life, filled with churning contradictions and conflicts, it delivers everything through layer upon layer of audio-visual contrast. Like Sergei Ovsiannikov, it is a tale made in the composition.
The next screening of Otets will be on October 6th at Amsterdam’s De Balie cinema. More details of the programme can be found here.
