Still from the movie «Products 24»< /p>
It is based on real events, partly on the story of the «Golyanov slaves» — citizens of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan from a grocery store in the capital's Golyanovo district. The heroine of the painting Muhabbat (Zukhara Sansyzbay) constantly lives and works in a grocery store in a residential area. In the basement of a concrete high-rise building with other migrants. Depressed and humiliated by the domineering mistress, like the others. Without money and documents. Trying to break free…
We visit these stores regularly, but we do not pay attention to their employees, who bring carts with groceries, unload trucks, and clean snow before entering.
In the eyes of employers, they are the same «expired products» that can be sold and bought for next to nothing.
So the regular customers of the store in Golyanovo didn’t seem to see or hear them, they didn’t know that these people had been in slavery for more than 12 years, receiving nothing for their work, huddled in back rooms, in premises unsuitable for habitation. They were beaten, raped, killed in the best of the capitals. And when they fled, the police returned them “to their place of residence.”
Muhabbat almost lost her will, she is ready to put up with many humiliations, lack of rights, especially since she is pregnant. But driven to the edge, the young woman dares to commit the most important act in life. This is a movie about humanity in an inhuman world filled to the brim with pain, in which «snow flies up» (as the picture was originally called).
Still from the film «Products 24»< /p>
Products is a story about modified slavery in modern society in front of thousands of indifferent people.
Mikhail Borodin knows about the problems of illegal immigrants firsthand. Arriving from Tashkent to Moscow, before entering the film school of Alexander Mitta, he worked as a laborer. In 2017, he made a short film about the annexation of Crimea. His short film «I'm Normal» participated in the «Critic Week» program in Cannes.
Products, according to the authors, is an anti-colonial look at the existing state of affairs in the ex-empire.
One of the episodes starred one of the real participants in the events in Golyanovo Bakiya Kasimova, who continues to fight for human dignity.
Producer of the film Artem Vasiliev believes that the participation of an acutely social film in the Berlin festival is extremely important not only for promoting the film , this is the case «when the release of a drama can influence people's lives.»
The script of the film was supported at the Cottbus film festival film market. And the film itself, filmed in co-production with Slovenia and Turkey, received financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation and the Kinoprime Foundation for the Development of Contemporary Cinema. =»SingleImage_image__3qIDn» alt=»» />
Still from the movie «Products 24»