Issue 87 (2025) |
[Aleksei Popogrebskii]: The Biggest Moon (Samaia bol’shaia luna, 2024) reviewed by Theodora Kelly McGee © 2025 |
The Biggest Moon was Aleksei Popogrebskii’s dream project. After several years of development and revision, the film was released in July 2024. Popogrebskii’s name, however, was notably removed from the credits, an announcement that was made via press release by the film’s distributor, Atmosfera Kino. The directorial credits were subsequently attributed to Popogrebskii’s longtime colleague and producer, Roman Borisevich.
A high-fantasy teen film, The Biggest Moon departs drastically from Popogrebskii’s established oeuvre. The emers are a superhuman race who can control and manipulate human feelings and emotions by draining them out of other people. They are immune to pain, but they are also incapable of feeling love and live at an emotional equilibrium. They must hunt—and collect—the spectrum of human emotions in order to save their race from morphing into cannibals who will entirely drain emotions, including those of the emers themselves. The film centers around Denis (Ivan Ivashov), a half-breed emer, who is charged with finding Katia (Simona Kust), the daughter of the emers’ leader and a half-breed with a hidden gift. Denis must find a way to activate Katia’s power, which would eventually bring pure (white) light to the emers—the biggest moon—and save their race. Predictably, complications arise when Katia begins to feel heightened emotions through her experiences with Denis.
On the one hand, high-fantasy is a complete pivot for Popogrebskii and, on the other, the film continues his exploration of human psychology and emotions in filmmaking. The director is consistently vocal about his interests in psychology and cinema, as he not only studied psychology at university, but his film How I Spent this Summer (Kak ia provel etim letom, 2010)—a psychological thriller—won several awards, including the Golden Eagle. The Biggest Moon is far less lauded, but it is a film that challenges us about how emotions affect human understanding of our environment and world, and it identifies the importance of isolation and its effect on human emotional development. One could, for example, view the work as a pandemic film and the exploration of human emotions in isolation during the Covid years while Popogrebskii was developing the story. A second reading, for example, is an obvious outgrowth of Popogrebskii’s perspective on psychological motivation. In an interview in 2019, he noted, “I studied psychology for nine years, and of those nine years, ‘motivation’ was a two-year course, it’s not something that gives its answers up easily” (in Hudson 2011). A third perspective, and perhaps the most timely one, is that the film is a statement about the complications of working through what is more important during wartime: to feel love or to not feel pain.
The film employs a prolific cast, to include television actor Ivashov and Filipp Iankovskii. Simona Kust as Katia is an interesting choice, given her career as a model (she is the face of a Saint Laurent campaign, for example). It is, moreover, interesting to consider the film’s place not only in Popogrebskii’s work, but on the broader landscape of fantasy filmmaking in Russian cinema. Popogrebskii, who for several years has served as curator of the Directors’ Program at the Moscow Film School, worked closely with Timur Bekmambetov, director of the Night Watch series and trailblazer for digital techniques in live-action films in Russian cinema. The Biggest Moon notably uses video or projection mapping, a technique new to Russian filmmaking that represents 3D projection onto physical objects but does not require any ancillary equipment for the screen or audience.
Popogrebskii’s work underwent several iterations in development prior to its final release. Initially conceived as a dystopian science-fiction narrative, the film was initially meant to be part of an international franchise series that played on the use of 3D.
Theodora Kelly McGee
Denison University
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Works Cited
Hudson, Isaac. 2011. “Interview: Aleksei Popogrebsky.” Cinephile UK, 3 April.
The Biggest Moon, Russia, 2024
Color, 99 min.
Director: Aleksei Popogrebskii
Script: Aleksei Popogrebskii, Elena Banina
Camera: Artem Zamashnoi
Sound: Igor' Vdovin
Cast: Ivan Ivashov, Simona Kust, Filipp Iankovskii, Aristarkh Venes, Aleksandr Grishin, Pavel Golubev, Sof'iia Skaiia
Producer: Roman Borisevich
Production: Atmosfera Kino
Release: 4 July 2024
[Aleksei Popogrebskii]: The Biggest Moon (Samaia bol’shaia luna, 2024) reviewed by Theodora Kelly McGee © 2025 |