Roman Volobuev

Roman Olegovich Volobuev (Russian: Роман Олегович Волобуев; born July 31, 1977; Moscow) is a Russian film and television director, screenwriter, producer, and former film critic. Volobuev is best known for his 8-year tenure as film reviewer at Afisha magazine and for writing and directing TV series The Last Minister and Just Imagine Things We Know. Born and raised in Moscow, Volobuev briefly worked as an investigative reporter at Obshaya Gazeta before starting to write film reviews for the Russian edition of Première magazine, Izvestia, Vedomosti and Iskusstvo Kino and in 2004 became a film section editor at Afisha. He also served as founding editor-in-chief of the short-lived Russian edition of Empire film magazine in 2007 and as deputy editor of GQ Russia in 2012. In 2013, Volobuev and his co-writer Lena Vanina developed a political comedy series Zavtra (Tomorrow) about Russian liberal opposition winning presidential election for an independent cable news station TV Rain. Only pilot episode was produced, since TV Rain ran into political and financial troubles and could no longer finance the show. Volobuev's debut feature film The Cold Front (2016) a chamber mystery drama shot in Normandy was met with mostly lukewarm reviews and failed at the Russian box-office. His second film a satirical action comedy Blokbaster (2017) fared much better with critics and received the Special Jury Prize at Kinotavr film festival, but was disowned by Volobuev after a public spat with producers over the final cut. He eventually found a mainstream success with the black political comedy TV series The Last Minister and a 4-part mini-series about Moscow media industry Just Imagine Things We Know both released in 2020. Volobuev also co-wrote a post-apocalyptic drama series Survivors (2021) and appeared as an actor in Valeriya Gai Germanika's Brief Guide To A Happy Life (2011), Boris Khlebnikov's Hot and Bothered (2015) and Konstantin Bogomolov's A Good Man (2020). Volobuev is highly critical of Russian authorities, once calling modern Russia "an authoritarian state with good Wi-Fi and a nice urban planning". He was a vocal supporter of Snow Revolution and has been detained during street protests in Moscow in 2012. In 2018, after the arrest of the fellow director Kirill Serebrennikov he publicly urged Russian filmmakers to stop applying for funding from Russia's Ministry of Culture. In 2022, Volobuev condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequently left Russia. In a manifesto published by Meduza he compared moral choices Russian filmmakers currently face to the ones German filmmakers faced under Hitler.

Works

The White List

During a nationwide moral panic caused by a recent spike in teenage suicides two federal investigators are sent to a small Russian town to review a cold case involving a suspicious death of a schoolgirl. Initially seeing their task as a mere PR stunt both gradually start to loose their focus as they venture deeper into the paranoid world of conspiracy theories surrounding the case.

Release Date:2023-11-23

Department:Production

Job:Co-Producer

Vote Count:1

Riot Days

Riot Days is an inventive and shocking performance based on the memoirs of Maria Alyokhina from Pussy Riot. With this performance, one of the main art groups in the world traveled to more than 200 countries in Europe, the USA, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand. The performance received many prestigious awards, and also gathered an enthusiastic press.

Release Date:2023-09-13

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Aurora

Sasha Zorina, who at the age of 10 became famous throughout the country for her main role in the popular blockbuster "Aurora", 15 years later works as a telephone psychologist at the suicide prevention center, drinks a lot and tries to continue her acting career without much success. When she comes to her senses after a protracted celebration of her 25th birthday, she realizes that she absolutely does not remember the previous four weeks. Trying to reconstruct the events of the month that fell out of her memory, the heroine plunges deeper into her past, where everything turns out to be much scarier and more dangerous than she thought.

Release Date:2022-10-26

Department:Writing

Job:Writer

Episode Count:8

Vote Count:3

Survivors

The series takes place in a small Russian town where a deadly virus appears. Most of the inhabitants die, only a few people remain alive, who are affected by sleeping sickness: people cannot wake up on their own, and after two hours of sleep they fall into a coma.

Release Date:2021-08-12

Department:Writing

Job:Writer

Episode Count:8

Vote Count:19

Just Imagine Things We Know

Ambitious creators of the telegram channel "PPCHMZ" are rapidly gaining hundreds of thousands of subscribers. For them, this is just the beginning: the girls are full of ideas and are not going to stop. However, scandalous revelations and overdue loans await them on their way to fame. A large investor offers to help them get rid of financial problems, whose only condition is to accept Yevgeny Malyshev, a well—known journalist of the old formation in the past - the "conscience of the era of the 2010s" - into the team. Now they will have to make decisions and fight for new subscribers together.

Release Date:2020-09-24

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Character:former colleague

Episode Count:1

Vote Count:6

Cursed Days

The brave new world of remoteness has created a new creature, the man of the era of self-isolation, and has given rise to amazing stories that would hardly have happened under other circumstances. Entomologist Victor was given a coupon for a Thai massage session by his colleagues, but instead of pleasure, the nerd got 2 weeks of completely unexpected quarantine away from home. Opposition leader Sasha reposted information critical of domestic medicine. The post was read by his brother - an official from the capital's mayor's office - and asked to immediately demolish everything. To feed a family accustomed to daily rib-eye steaks, Swiss ice cream and sushi, traffic police inspector Kogotkov comes up with a cunning plan to remotely bribe a car enthusiast. And Dimon owes Kostyan a decent amount of money, but he is in no hurry to return it. Kostyan hires Vitya, a scoundrel, to go to Dimon and collect the debt.

Release Date:2020-06-11

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Episode Count:1

Vote Count:8

The Last Minister

When an active loser is appointed the Minister of Planning, no one can imagine what this will lead to. It turns out that the new minis- ter really wants to change people’s lives for the better and for this, together with the team, is actively promoting his own initiatives. True, these initiatives are not always reasonable, and the result is extremely unpredictable.

Release Date:2020-03-26

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Character:Y, senior curator from the presidential administration

Episode Count:16

Vote Count:14

Middleground

Him and her. A husband and a wife staying in a cozy hotel where you can come for just a couple of days with a risk to get stuck forever. It is so easy to get trapped in the daily routine. Indeed, nothing is more permanent than the temporary. Their time is like a flat circle. He has his phone calls and business meetings. She is wrapped in her dreams and doubts. All reactions are predictable, all conversations are learnt by heart. An endless LP record of life keeps playing again and again repeating itself. But a few things can break this tune, like a scratch on the record, a crack on a wine glass, a sudden glance or a meeting with a stranger. And then you know: tomorrow will come soon. Any moment something can go wrong, throw you off course, and force you to make a choice.

Release Date:2017-11-02

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Vote Count:11

Blockbuster

A wannabe model from a small Russian town robs a local bank to fund her modeling career.

Release Date:2017-07-13

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:21

The Passenger

Moscow. 1970. The hero of the USSR, cosmonaut Nikolai Valerievich Basov, tries to recover from a tragedy that darkened his life. He leads a solitary life, having withdrawn into his apartment. Nikolai hardly notices the world around him and can no longer relate to life as he did before his accident – the fatal 36 hours after an emergency landing in the taiga, which left an indelible trace on his life. After a strike of fate, people start to mysteriously disappear around Basov. He suddenly realizes that it is not simple to get rid of this strange influence of outer space ...

Release Date:2017-06-09

Department:Writing

Job:Screenplay

Vote Count:4

The Cold Front

Sasha and Ilya, a bored young couple on a verge of breakup, are spending a New Year's Eve at a secluded beach house in Northern France then a carcass of an unidentified creature is washed ashore nearby. Later that day on his way back from a local bar Ilya meets Masha, a lost Russian girl, who seems to have gotten off the train at the wrong station and has nowhere to spend the night.

Release Date:2016-01-14

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Vote Count:14

Concerned

Realizing that something needs to change in life, a simple girl Sasha Gvozdikova leaves Yekaterinburg for Moscow, abandoning a boring job and a married lover. She writes short stories and dreams of getting them published, but overestimates her writing talent. Together with Sasha, two of her best friends from Yekaterinburg, Katya and Alyona, live in Moscow. The plot of the story revolves around three heroines who are trying to find themselves in metropolitan life and in relationships.

Release Date:2015-11-09

Character:Владимир Семёнов

Episode Count:21

Tomorrow

Release Date:2015-02-23

Department:Editing

Job:Editor

Последний министр

Department:Directing

Job:Director

Quest

Release Date:2015-10-26

Department:Writing

Job:Writer

Character:

Episode Count:8