IIt was March 2022 and Joshua Oppenheimer was waiting at Copenhagen airport for the young man he would be staying with for a few weeks. Oppenheimer, who directed two devastating, Oscar-nominated documentaries about the 1965 Indonesian genocide, “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” had been working closely with Russian cinematographer Mikhail Krychman. He was now preparing to make “The End,” a gritty musical about the last family on Earth hiding in their bunker after a climate-related apocalypse in which they were complicit. Vlad, Mikhail’s 22-year-old son, was traveling to Copenhagen to participate in a workshop on the challenges involved in the film “The End,” part of which was scheduled to be filmed in German and Italian salt mines.
Oppenheimer had never met Vlad before, although he knew his joie de vivre and his infectious sense of humor. But the young man who showed up on arrival that day, after getting off a flight from Moscow, had a completely different personality. “He looked terrible,” the director recalls. “He was pale. He was stuttering. He was traumatized. It was frankly heartbreaking. I said to him: ‘What’s wrong?’ He said: ‘I can’t go back.’
After consulting a lawyer, it was decided that Vlad would seek asylum in Denmark. “You invite someone to a workshop, and suddenly you put them in a refugee camp,” Oppenheimer says. From the camp in Copenhagen, Vlad was transferred to another camp in Jutland, western Denmark, where he spent the next six months. “Vlad was clear from the beginning. He said, ‘If this is the only way I can stay out of Russia, then I have to do it.'”
Oppenheimer speaks via video from a cabin in Norway. Sitting next to me in a London office is Michael, or Misha as his friends know him. Although he has heard Oppenheimer tell this story before, he furrows his brow in worry, reliving his son’s ordeal. It was Mikhail, after all, who had accompanied Vlad to the Moscow airport for the 2 a.m. flight to Copenhagen, and who had been watching from a distance as Vlad approached passport control. “Once I survived, I breathed again,” he says.
Contrary to expectations, no one suspected that Vlad was fleeing the country to avoid being sent to fight in Ukraine, which Russia had invaded just two weeks earlier. The system was still in disarray, and it was left to the discretion of officials to ask additional questions. Soon, this will no longer be the case. If Vlad and Mikhail were still in Russia, they would be stuck – and in prison, no doubt. It was established last month by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project that they had been listed by the Interior Ministry as extremists for supporting the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Vlad is now a refugee. “I didn’t really know what the term ‘refugee’ meant, or how someone became a refugee,” he told me, speaking from Denmark. “Then I applied and it became my life.” He is waiting to find out if he will be allowed to stay. His initial request for asylum was rejected last fall. His final appeal will be heard this week.
For several years before his escape, Vlad tried to avoid the draft by keeping a low profile in the home he shared with his parents and younger brother. “Sometimes people come from the military office,” he explains. “Or it would be the police. My whole family had reached this state of mobilization where we turned off the lights and stopped answering the door or the phone for anyone we didn’t know.
But time was running out. By late 2021, the pressures on Vlad had intensified. He is now threatened with two years in prison if he does not agree to military service. Following Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the situation escalated. “I did not know at the time that asylum was possible,” he says. “I knew I needed to get out.” Even if his maternal family had not been Ukrainian, and faced constant bombing at their home in Kiev, he would not have joined their ranks. “As a pacifist, I would never have been able to fight, let alone an illegal war against my mother’s family and the sovereign people of Ukraine.”
Shortly after Vlad escaped, Mikhail felt that he and the rest of the family must leave as well. Were they in actual danger? “It’s more subconscious than that,” he says. “It’s like a memory from your gut, your roots, your blood. You start remembering what you read about people who left Russia after the revolution.
“Misha is old enough to have lived most of his life under the Soviet Union,” Oppenheimer says. And it was a deep memory of that, and its trauma, that told him: If you can leave now, leave.
With the help of friends, director Michael among them evaluated the options. Many of his former colleagues had already fled. One of them, its Ukrainian producer Alexander Rodnyansky, was tried in absentia last October for speaking out against the invasion. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison. “We’re all spread out all over the world,” says Mikhail gloomily.
Mikhail, his wife and their youngest son, aged 15, moved to London made possible by the Global Talent Visa, available to those working in the arts, sciences or digital technology. Michael’s request was supported by industry figures such as Tilda Swinton, one of the stars of The End. While waiting for that visa to be approved, Mikhail and his family slept on couches and in the spare rooms of his friends, including Oppenheimer. During this turmoil, filmmaking provided a way for Mikhail to reflect on and escape from his own situation. “Work kept me sane,” he says.
There are inevitably echoes of his life in the work he did with director Andrey Zvyagintsev, because much of it was a critique of modern Russia. Their film Elena, from 2011, is about a young man whose father tries to help him avoid military service, albeit through nefarious means. (In this case, the events lead to murder.)
The two projects that Mikhail launched during the years of his family’s dispersion also proved eerily related. “The End” — which he signed on for in 2018 but, thanks to Covid and an extensive development process, wasn’t made until 2023 — is about “how self-deception undermines our ability to love,” according to Oppenheimer. Mikhail is quick to identify echoes in the film’s characters, whose lies and delusions lead to their demise.
“We ended up with a disaster and a dehumanization of our society because we did not resolve the terrible mistakes Russia made in the past,” he says. “That’s what I said a lot about the ending,” Oppenheimer adds. “Russia is like a culture in a basement.”
“Yes,” Michael agrees. “The family lie reflects the lies in society. At every level, people lie to each other. In factories, in government, in the streets – everywhere.
When production on The End wrapped in the summer of 2023, Mikhail faced the problem of what to do next. “On the last day, I stepped into the elevator into this bright sunlight from the Sonderhausen mine 800 meters away. I had been invited to go to northern Italy to film Vermiglio, a wartime drama directed by Moura Del Piero. “I knew I had to I take it to continue. To motivate me and stay sane. In its story of a fugitive and the rural community that hosts him, the film, currently longlisted for an Oscar, offered a mirror to Vlad’s situation.
“You could describe my eldest son as a deserter because he doesn’t want to fight,” says Mikhail. “There is a struggle in Vermiglio between people who welcome the deserter and others who say, ‘Traitor!’” When you wake up five times a night and your mind is trying to process your problems, it somehow… Everything It becomes attached to what is dear to your heart. But when we were making vermaglio in the mountains, I thought about the deserters who didn’t want to fight. “I can’t get rid of the thought that this could be my son if he gets drafted.”
Carefree days are a thing of the past for Mikhail and his family, but this week will be especially stressful. The decision on Vlad’s appeal will not be made until a few days later, and Mikhail is understandably worried. At some point during our conversation, he broke down. Vlad also looks visibly agitated, his face etched with worry. But despite all that, the young man remains defiant. “Russia is killing innocents, assassinating democratic leaders like Navalny, and threatening freedoms around the world,” he says. “As long as this continues, I will be proud to be included among the extremists who oppose Vladimir Putin and his criminal state.”