Director
"Hello Rufus! Today they took my mother..." A little Dwarf writes to his brother from Magnitogorsk to Moscow. Karik is only 10 years old, but he already knows words like “search" well. Only when he goes from the description of the arrest to the description of the birthday dinner, you can guess what the child is writing. This letter will soon be eighty years old, but it could have been written today. After all, each of the numerous child heroes of this film has already experienced the same thing as Karik in Stalin's time.
Director of Photography
«Grozny Blues» follows a few people around Grozny, the capital of war-torn Chechnya where daily life is defined by political repression, constricting customs, forced Islamification and the failure to come to terms with recent history. The film revolves around four women who have been fighting for human rights under worsening conditions for many years but get more and more disillusioned with the situation in Putin’s Russia. The building where they work is also home to a Blues Club that is frequented by a group of young people. Having only vague memories of the Chechen wars in the 90s, they try to make sense of the strange things that are happening in their country. In linking the personal and intimate to the political, Nicola Bellucci shows in a dramatic and yet very poetic way what it means to live in a divided society that navigates a no-man’s land between war and peace, repression and freedom, archaic traditions and modern life.
