They loved him until they didn’t. In 2020, Michael Lockshin, an American director who was so trusted in the Russian Film industry that the state credited 40% of the total fund for his movie called, The master and margarita, based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic stalin-era novel.
But today if Lockshin even dares to step into Russia, Laws would be imposed on him and he would be arrested. Russian national media have even called him words like ‘criminal’ and ‘terrorist’.
But what terrible did he do, to deserve such appalling treatment?
The American film director on February 2022, while living in los Angeles and editing his film, he posted a post supporting Ukraine. When the film finally opened in russia-the attacks by influential supporters of the kremlin began.
A large telegram channel even called him a Russiaphobe and a right wing group demanded criminal charges imposed against Lockshin. One T.V. presenter of the nation Vladimir Solovyov asked on his show, “How could this unpatriotic film have been authorized?” another presenter name, Tigran Keosayan, who is married to the head of Russian state television, demanded an investigation into how the film was produced.
Despite the movie’s anti-authoritarian theme, Lockshin said he was not worries about the political backlash when he started on the project in 2020. He said in an interview with the BBC “We pitched it as a movie about a writer who is censored, even more so than in the book, a writer who’s censored in Stalin’s ’30s, very much about censorship, repressions, purges and terror of the Stalin era. We were very conscious that those themes were relevant for Putin’s Russia at that time, but censorship was not anywhere near where it is today. It’s hard to imagine that just three years ago, we were in a very different world.”
Now after the backlash the American director is permanently settled in Los Angeles. He does not feel this like an ‘exile’, in fact in the continuation of the interview he said “I’m sad, of course, that I won’t be able to go back in any foreseeable future,” he says. And he now says of the head-spinning way the Russian establishment turned against him, “It was very ironic and very funny in a way as well, but also scary. It was a mix of all these emotions. But you know, I kept on thinking about how Bulgakov would be looking at this, and he would just be laughing his head off.”
