Laura Sisteró
Born in Barcelona in 1986. In 2008 she obtained a degree in Audiovisual Production at EMAV. In 2012 she obtained a university degree in film at the ESCAC school in Barcelona, specialising in documentary filmmaking. She currently combines her work as a photographer, advertising and television director, with more personal fiction and documentary film projects. Tolyatti Adrift is her first feature documentary.
Director’s statement
“I arrived in Tolyatti with the idea of portraying how young people in one of the poorest cities in Russia were building a future, looking for certain connections with my own adolescence, without knowing exactly what I would find. I spent my adolescence in a small town on the outskirts of Barcelona that bears many similarities with Tolyatti’s reality. A town that had also grown out of control due to the demand for workers in the car factory. The tremendous immigration of the place meant that few felt rooted, that there was no community cohesion and that most of my high school classmates were already depressed for life and only aspired to work in that factory, to end up mortgaging themselves to be able to have one of the cars they made themselves. They tuned them and made noise by pressing the accelerator, so that their existence in this life would leave a mark, even if it was only the marks of their tyres on the asphalt, like involuntary SOS messages.
As a reader of science fiction from the 60s and 70s, I think that today we live in that ungraspable written future and I like to look for traces of the dystopia that belongs to us in the present. We are facing a global conflict due to the change of capitalist economic paradigms; of how the rupture and political systems directly affect young people and their future. I arrive in Tolyatti on a Friday night. The streets are deserted, there is absolutely nothing lively, upward or inspiring. The large neighborhoods with their courtyards are designed to grow as families, to reproduce themselves in an involuntary socialism that to this day has not been regenerated since the foundations that support these communities are the same and rusted. Some boys go to a shop where a lady fills up their plastic bottle with the beer of their choice. They walk towards the Volga, they run, they mess with each other amicably and they drink.
And between drinks they confess to me that they drink to solve everything: “your girlfriend leaves you, you drink; you get kicked out of school, you drink; your father has died, you drink; your girlfriend is a lesbian, you drink; you don’t have a job, you drink”. They are 17 years old and already survivors. [...] The young people of Tolyatti drive their lives aimlessly, drifting, turning in circles on the same axle endlessly until they wear it out, until they break it. Tolyatti Adrift is a documentary about survival through the glorious icons of yesteryear, the idea of creating shelters anchored in the past in the face of the difficulty of moving forward.”