Synopsis

(104’, 2022, Sweden, Norway, France, Germany, dir. Marusya Syroechkovskaya, producers Ksenia Gapchenko, Mario Adamson)

2005. In the “depression Federation” (Russia), governed by leaders keen to bring forth an authoritarian dream, millennial suicides have become omnipresent – a last act of self-will among a generation denied the chance to envision a better future.

Taking her turn, Marusya, 16, has decided this will be her year to die.

Marusya is surprised, then, to meet a soulmate: Kimi, a young man whose depression and addictions mirror her own. They become inseparable, filming the euphoria and anxiety, the happiness and despair of their youth, all the while burning the candle at both end -- fuelled by drugs and music amid the tactile freedom discovered in Marusya’s exploration as an artist.

Their unbreakable love story takes hold in this destructive world, and Marusya uses her camera to chronicle it all – from the rise of hope as she and Kimi get married and begin their lives together, to the ever-increasing threat from their country’s internal weapons of isolation and division.

When Kimi’s drug addiction pushes him over the edge of his tortured descent, his attempts to use the governments’ own repressive tools to his advantage create a new Kafkaesque unreality designed to have him slowly disappear. Marusya’s camera now becomes her last chance to save something of the fragile Kimi.

HOW TO SAVE A DEAD FRIEND speaks the language of a disenfranchised, silenced generation fluently, as it “saves” one voice from being lost forever.