I Don't Believe in Anarchy

Punk may have started in New York and London, but the extremely famous and famously extreme existential cult Siberian 80's band Grazhdanskaya Oborona (Civil Defense) and it's visionary leader Yegor Letov created something far more profound and sublime than the western rock-n-roll that had inspired it. The movie chronicles Letov's life from the 70s to the beginning of 90s (he died in 2008) and it seemingly follows every rock documentary convention: talking heads, concert video, and what looks like archival footage... Yet the interviews do not explain why the homemade recordings went viral to become the most important songs for so many completely different people well after the soviet reality to which they are supposedly addressed disappeared while the found footage and re-created live sequences are molded into something uncannily transcendent. The lo-fi-style and daring spirit of this visually elaborate film is authentic to its subject: so that the movie manages to capture the aura of the time and place and to convey the energy and significance of Letov's performances even to people who don't care about "punk".