Backstage at Russia's most prized institution — the Bolshoi Theatre — in the year after a senior dancer hired an attacker to throw acid in the face of the company's artistic director. Directed by Nick Read; Maxim Pozdorovkin executive produced.
In January 2013, a masked man threw a jar of sulphuric acid in the face of Sergei Filin, the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet. The attacker, it turned out, had been hired by one of Filin's own lead dancers. The scandal cracked open a company that had been a closed Russian institution for two centuries — and the documentary went in to film the year afterward.
Bolshoi Babylon moves between rehearsal rooms, executive offices, and the homes of dancers across one season after the attack, while the company tries to put itself — and its mythology — back together. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the film "becomes most interesting when it explores the theatre's internal politics"; Peter Bradshaw, in The Guardian, called it "an enthralling documentary [that] reveals the extraordinary upheavals at the Bolshoi Ballet as the tip of Russia's rage iceberg."
"This enthralling documentary reveals the extraordinary upheavals at the Bolshoi Ballet as the tip of Russia's rage iceberg."
"Becomes most interesting when it explores the theatre's internal politics."
"Induces a sense of awe… revealing and intimate."
"Twin tracts of darkness and light, the sordid and the sublime, quite effectively submerge the viewer into a closed world."
Laura Bleiberg · Los Angeles Times · Nov 2015