Street 'gopniks' attacking main hero of 'Drifter'
Streets turned into hunting sites, self-proclaimed war engulfs a little Ukrainian town just a few miles away from its capital city Kiev… This could be an intriguing insight into a new short film Drifter produced by Alexander Obraz, a well-known director of pop music videos in the past. Obraz manages to play on the most sensitive issues in today’s Russian society which is literally split between westernized “homo sapiens” and massive tribes of poorly educated, malnourished misfits or “gopniks”, as city dwellers contemptuously call them.
Drifter‘s plot is simple and bizarre. A well-to-do Ukranian guy (supposedly IT-manager or ad copywriter) takes his posh car to a local food store where he buys chunks of shitty appetizers and a bottle of vodka which he then mixes with lethal poison. This is his evil “dessert” that he voluntarily shares with gopniks as they attack him on a dark side street in a depressive industrial district.
He is manager in the day time but at nights he turns into a hunter
The mission is on. Every single day he buys new candies for the much-hatred gopniks and poisons another tribe of those who “can only spread fear and smoke air”. This cruel Nietzschean struggle, albeit made-up, is one of the first attempts to depict real ruptures in modern post-soviet countries with the two parts of their population living in isolated worlds on the same territory. And one of the most discussed.