Vladimir Koptsev

I was born in Togliatti, a city that was built almost from scratch in ten years for the car industry. That may be why I started out in engineering and studied industrial and civil construction. I wanted to understand what holds a structure up, where the load sits, where it can fail, and how one bad decision in a drawing can bring the whole thing down.

I graduated from Togliatti State University in 2012, worked on construction sites, and then, unexpectedly, ended up in television. News reporting taught me something I still rely on: you cannot take a story on trust. You have to go there, look for yourself, ask questions, and collect the texture of what actually happened. I still care less about elegant phrasing than about proof, tone, and the dust on a person's shoes.

Before cinema, there were other, very different schools in my life. Afghanistan is not an abstract historical subject to me; it belongs to my family and personal context. Before directing came military school, Muay Thai, stunt work, and television. All of that stayed with me in the way I think about action, the body, risk, and the discipline inside a frame.

Cinema came later. I was already in my thirties when I entered Alexander Sokurov's directing workshop at SPbGIKiT. Before that there were acting classes at Gogol School, introductory filmmaking at Alexander Mitta's school, and cinematography studies with Alexander Nosovsky. Sokurov gave me the most important thing: the sense that cinema can be a way of investigating the world, not just presenting it.

I graduated in 2022. My diploma film, The Wild Brigade, was a feature documentary about veterans, memory, and the way war stays with a person for decades. I spent time with the men in the film, visited their homes, listened to how they spoke about the past, and paid attention to what they chose not to say. For me it was not simply a project. It was a test of whether war can be filmed without turning it into an illustration.

Then came Duality, released in 2024. It is also a feature documentary, but it is built differently. If The Wild Brigade is about what the past leaves inside a person, Duality is about trying to find yourself in the present. I made it with Sergei Lukianchenko, my fellow student from Sokurov's workshop. We filmed in Orthodox churches in Russia and Thailand and worked with people searching for meaning through ascetic life. The festivals in Riga and Rome mattered, of course, but the more lasting result was personal: on that film I understood how much I care about the border between document and invention, between fact and memory.

I live in Barcelona now. Lena and I are raising our five-year-old son. He knows his father makes films, but he still has no idea why it takes so much time. Lena is still my co-author. Sometimes I tell him that I build structures too, just not out of concrete — out of shots and scenes. The engineer in me never disappeared. I still think about dramaturgy as a load-bearing system. If there is no truth and no form at the base, nothing above it will stand for long.