Ryzhy

Summary

Set in Yekaterinburg during the turbulent 1990s, Ryzhy follows Boris Ryzhy, a gifted young poet and junior researcher at the Institute of Geophysics. Boris moves through a city marked by economic hardship, violence, and uncertainty, spending his nights with a loose circle of fellow poets at parties, readings, and impromptu gatherings. His intelligence, humor, and easy charm allow him to move between very different worlds: he can debate literature with artists, bargain with local criminals, and turn an everyday confrontation into a performance. At the center of the film is Boris himself, portrayed as both an exceptionally talented writer and a restless, contradictory young man. He is surrounded by friends and fellow poets who share his ambitions and anxieties, as well as the people closest to him, who see the strain behind his public confidence. His journey takes him from the rough streets and cramped apartments of Yekaterinburg to Moscow, where he travels to accept recognition for his work. Yet professional success does little to resolve the conflicts within him or the tension between his poetic imagination and the world he inhabits. Rather than presenting a conventional, neatly structured literary biopic, Ryzhy offers an impressionistic portrait of a charismatic artist trying to find meaning in a chaotic era. The film explores the uneasy coexistence of tenderness and aggression, intellectual idealism and streetwise survival, friendship and loneliness. It also examines the price of turning personal pain and social disillusionment into art. The cold industrial landscape of post-Soviet Yekaterinburg becomes more than a backdrop: it reflects Boris’s alienation, while his poems provide a fragile counterpoint to the brutality around him. With its blend of raw realism, dark humor, and lyrical atmosphere, Ryzhy is ultimately a meditation on youth, artistic identity, and the difficulty of remaining sensitive in a hardened world.