This film was created as part of Anatoly Bely’s Cinematic Poetry project.

Sergei Esenin’s “Out, harmonica! Boredom…boredom…” was difficult to adapt into a form and style suitable for the screen, since it lacks any kind of plot or clear meaning, instead communicating a mere feeling and sense of the months leading up to the poet’s death, spent in a drunken haze and extravagant dissolution. 

We visualized the atmosphere which had overwhelmed the poet, reaching for a kind of hyperbole and the surrealist form of theatrical delivery.

The main character was played by famous theatre and film actor Artyom Bystrov, who inhabited the role of the poet on a deeply emotional level, living through his pain and desperation—just how Esenin must have felt at the time. 

Mitzva Bar, where we filmed this, managed to fit more than 30 background actors and the entire film crew. The painstaking work of the costume designer, composer and a well-chosen location helped us precisely recreate the atmosphere of a demonic watering hole and mysterious brothel, a place capable of destroying the body and soul of a person in the most horrible way yet deeply familiar to any Russian. 

We filmed this in a single shot, framed with the repetition of several lines from the poem. 

This type of delivery offered the work a new echo, creating an atmosphere of obsession that confuses audiences, then leads them to a new level of perception.