‘Shot a piece of junk — redo it’: Putin aide Medinsky calls for quality control over state-funded films

Russia’s film industry suffers from inadequate state quality control, presidential aide and former Culture Ministry head Vladimir Medinsky said in an interview with Ekspert magazine.

Medinsky argued that the industry today has too much state money and too few market mechanisms — leaving it, in his words, “stuck between socialism and capitalism.”

“The result is a pile of mediocre film products. The state means well. But it can’t manage to keep track of quality. And oversight needs to happen at every stage: the idea, the script, the shoot, the release,” Medinsky said.

He added that Soviet censorship bodies monitored not only ideological deviations but also the quality of the product, and argued the same principle should apply today: if a producer uses state money to make a bad film, it should not be accepted.

“I don’t idealize Soviet censorship, but it had an undeniable artistic benefit — shoddy work didn’t make it into distribution. Shot a piece of junk — redo it,” he said.

In December 2025, director Alexander Sokurov told a meeting of the Presidential Council for Human Rights attended by Vladimir Putin that censorship existed in Russian cinema and literature. “We can see it in film, in literature, and in the work of bookstores, where the authorities are raising serious complaints about creative professionals,” Sokurov said. “In my view, this is a major, serious problem, because people are being deprived of the opportunity to realize their artistic ideas — simply to work in their profession. And very often these people are not told why they are being treated harshly and uncompromisingly.”

On March 1, 2026, several legislative changes came into force in Russia, including measures affecting the cultural sphere. In particular, films that “discredit traditional spiritual and moral values” are now banned from being shown.