Russian Director of Netflix’s ‘Dovlatov’ on Dreaming About Putin, Memories of Soviet Times

“I always meet Putin in my dreams,” says Russian director Alexey German Jr., whose film “Dovlatov” was a favorite with the critics at the Berlin Film Festival, where it was picked up by Netflix for the U.S.

and other English-speaking territories, as well as Scandinavia.The film, about real-life Soviet writer Sergei Dovlatov and his circle of friends in Leningrad (now known as St.

Petersburg) in the early 1970s, shows the scribe’s dreams in which he meets Brezhnev.

“Almost all [Russian] artists see a meeting with the Czar in their dreams,” German tells Variety.

“My father often saw a meeting with Stalin.”In his dreams, Dovlatov is also seen revisiting the prison camp where he had served as a guard, a place that German describes as “hell”.

“That camp stayed with him all his life.

Sometimes he was scared to go in dark places,” the director says.Dovlatov, described by German as “one of the greatest

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