Balabanov’s son may complete late director’s last film

The 23-year-old son of the late filmmaker Alexei Balabanov, who died on Saturday, has mooted the possibility of finishing his father’s final film. In an interview with Izvestia, Fyodor Balabanov said he had discussed the matter with his father days before he died. “Father wasn’t against it, ” he said. “I haven’t read the script but I know that actresses Renata Litvinova and Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė are meant to be part of it.”

Balabanov’s longtime producer Sergei Selyanov said the working title of the unfinished script was My Brother Has Died. “I’m not sure whether someone will be able to finish it instead of Alexei,” he said. “All I can say is that it’s not Brother 3 as some have suggested.”

Balabanov, 54, who died from a heart attack not far from his home in St Petersburg, was known internationally for his 1997 crime film Brother and its sequel Brother 2. Throughout his 25-year career as a filmmaker, he made 16 films many of which were antiwar, including War, Blind Man’s Bluff and It Doesn’t Hurt. His other films explored the chaos and violence that characterised the immediate periods before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The filmmaker once said: “I don’t make movies with ideas. Ideas make for bad cinema. I don’t make my movies for the intelligentsia, but for the people. That’s why they like my films.”

The death spurred Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to post the following message on his Facebook page: “The films of Alexei Balabanov were a collective portrait of the country in the most dramatic periods of its history.”