Russia’s Open Book: Writing in the Age of Putin

PBS; Wilton Films; Dir. Paul Mitchell.

A film celebrating contemporary Russian authors who are carrying on one of the world’s great literary traditions – on their own terms. We were commissioned to create a series of vivid animated sequences that would bring to life four extracts of modern Russian literature, voiced by Stephen Fry. From the futurist golden sterlets of Vladimir Sorokin’s ‘The Day of the Oprichnik’, to a blind boy in his imaginary forest (from Mariam Petrosyan’s magical realist ‘The House, In Which’), or the nihilism of Zakhar Prilepin’s ‘Sankya’ – we took a unique approach for each animation to reflect each individual writer’s style and subject.