The artistic documentary "Otets" is based on the life of the remarkable man Sergei Ovsiannikov (1952 Leningrad – 2018 Amsterdam). He is known far beyond the borders of the Netherlands for his courageous resistance against Russia’s military interventions in Ukraine and the militant policies of the powerful Russian Church. In line with Sergei's legacy, the Amsterdam church distanced itself from the Russian Church in 2022, due to its support for Putin’s war. This was hailed as a heroic act throughout Ukraine.
Sergei was a father and a priest, but Otets is not about religion. In the film, we follow his lifelong quest for freedom. This same search for freedom brought the filmmaker to the Netherlands in the 1990s. In Otets she engages in a conversation with the deceased Father. Did he manage to find freedom in the free West? Is it even possible for them born and raised under a dictatorship to achieve freedom?
The film begins in the Soviet past, during Sergei's youth in an exemplary communist family. However, as he grows up, he becomes a free thinker, which leads to his imprisonment in a Soviet prison. In solitary confinement, he discovers the greatest enemy of freedom - the ‘inner sniper guard’ (fear and self-censorship), planted by the regime in the heads of Soviet citizens. The ‘inner guard’ also determines his relationship with his father. When Sergei gives up his physics studies at the university to pursue priesthood, his communist father renounces his son. Eventually, Father Sergei finds himself in Amsterdam, where he transforms a small immigrant church into a large multicultural community—a place where Eastern Europeans and Westerners, believers and non-believers, find their safe home. Like Tarkovsky's Stalker, he leads hundreds of people to the secret room of desire, to freedom. But he himself never enters the room. His quest for freedom proves to be a lifelong battle with the macabre inheritance of his homeland – the ‘inner sniper guard’. While hundreds of people adore him, honour him as an ideal father, almost a holy person, his biological children reveal a different dark side of their father. A strict, punishing, and demanding father who burdened them with fear instead of freedom. He physically left his dictatorial homeland, but dictatorship continues to ‘fester’ in his mind, as his oldest daughter puts it. It doesn't stop there. They pass on father's inner sniper guard to their own children.
