Лидия Боброва: Кино и отражение российской действительности

Russian film director

Lidia Bobrova (born 13 June 1952) is a Russian film director born in Zabaikalsk, Soviet Union (now Russia). One of her films was Granny, which earned her a special jury prize at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2003.

Lidyia Bobrova was born in 1952 in the far east area of Amur. She studied History in university before moving on to the study of screen writing and directing. Following a granny in Russia who takes care of her children, grand children and neighbours children. Her films deal with preoccupations of nature and societal fabric. Scholars have argued that these traditional examinations of society are an examination of the current life in Russia. She represents these movies with long takes, realist mis en scene and static camera work. Bobrova, took realism to a high degree even using non professional actors even in critical roles, such as the titular grandmother in Babusyia.

Bobrova foregrounds gender in her filmography. Her award winning film Babousia examines the life of a grandmother as her family changes in the soviet era. The struggling matriarch in Babuysia for one, in other films Bobrova has reversed traditional gender norms, depicting women doing tasks of physical labour or men doing domestic work. Family relationships and brotherly connection are at the centre of her first film Oi, vy, gusi. Examining their male relationship. Her films correlate male cultivation of land toward Russian communist values or oppose them. Bobrova expands on this parable throughout her filmography, with the question of women as primary caretakers at the forefront of her work. She also uses age as a cinematic technique of representation in her work. By drawing on the difference between the ages of siblings in Oi, vy, gusi or the grandmother, this aging becomes symbolic of relationships with the past and spirituality.