Vladimir Koptsev

My parents met in Afghanistan. My father, a young lieutenant, went there straight out of military academy. My mother, a construction college graduate, says she went to fulfill her internationalist duty. I used to believe that. So did she.

Togliatti, where I grew up, was built from scratch in ten years for a single car factory. I don't remember the collapse of the Soviet Union. I was busy with my pacifier and porridge. Ordinary childhood: kindergarten, school, the only child, spoiled beyond reason. My mother took me to boxing. By the hand. Life made more sense after that.

My father said: you're going to military construction academy. My mother added: engineering is respectable. I agreed, though I never liked taking orders, drafting, or doing calculations. I did well in every subject except the ones a builder actually needs. The philosophy, English, and cultural studies professors loved me. They expelled me anyway. Not for my grades, but for my questions.

After another year of military service as a regular soldier, I came back to Togliatti. With no idea what I wanted, I tried everything. Air conditioners, guitar, ballroom dancing, hand-to-hand combat, bridge construction. I finished my degree at Togliatti State University in industrial and civil engineering, just in case. By graduation I knew for certain I would never be a builder. From construction to utilities, from utilities to sales. Then I packed a suitcase and left for St. Petersburg.

In St. Petersburg I quickly realized I liked cinema. By then I had moved from boxing to Muay Thai and became the city's Thai boxing champion. I got onto film sets as a stuntman. Explosions, car chases, fights, climbing ledges at height, a rope snapping... pavement. Three months on my back, six surgeries, crutches, first steps. I stayed in cinema, but moved to the other side of the camera.

I spent a few years as a TV news reporter. A reporter goes to the scene, sees it firsthand, asks questions, writes it down. I got used to the idea that a story needs evidence. Facts, intonations, the dust on your boots.

I was past thirty when I entered Alexander Sokurov's directing workshop at SPbGIKiT. Before that I took acting courses at Gogol School, introductory filmmaking at the Mitta School, and studied cinematography with Alexander Nosovsky. Sokurov taught me that cinema is a way of researching the world, not just telling stories.

I graduated in 2022. My diploma work was "Wild Brigade," a feature documentary about veterans and how they carry their war through decades. I spent time with them: visited their homes, listened to how they talk about the past. I wanted to know if you can film war without turning it into illustration.

That same year I left Russia. A year in Thailand, a year in Armenia, then Barcelona. In Thailand, together with Sergei Lukianchenko, a fellow student from Sokurov's workshop, I filmed "Duality," a feature documentary about people who seek meaning through ascetic practice. We worked in Orthodox churches in Russia and Thailand. The film screened in Riga and Rome. Making it, I understood what draws me most: where the document stops and something else starts.

I live in Barcelona now. My wife Lena and I have a son. He's five. He knows dad makes films but doesn't understand why I'm always busy. I tell him I'm building structures, just out of shots instead of concrete. Lena is still my co-author. The engineering thinking never left. I still look at a plot the way I'd look at a load-bearing wall.