Russia drafts guide on making films and TV series to strengthen ‘traditional family values’

Russia has drafted recommendations for film studios on making movies and TV series meant to “preserve and strengthen the strong family as a traditional Russian spiritual and moral value,” the Russian business news outlet RBC reported, citing sources. One of the outlet’s sources said the recommendations are voluntary.

The version of the document reviewed by RBC lays out detailed principles for creating films, TV series, and online content about family life, along with possible dramatic models and storylines, a breakdown of the character system and visual approach, guidance on tailoring content to audience characteristics, and other sections.

Among other things, the authors of the recommendations advise:

• Depicting the family as a “bastion of stability” amid “external turbulence.”
• Avoiding portrayals of the family solely as “a restriction on freedom, an obstacle to personal development, or an outdated form of social organization.”
• Ruling out any portrayal of love within the family as “justification for psychological pressure, humiliation, violence, neglect, emotional dependency, or other destructive behavior presented as the norm of closeness.”
• Paying attention to family memory: “stories about ancestors, family archives, keepsakes, family rituals, holidays, and shared labor.”
• Avoiding any suggestion that love of family and love of country are at odds. Patriotism and love for one’s native region should be “a natural continuation of the family value system.”
• Ensuring that “crisis, breakup, betrayal, irresponsibility, or abandonment of loved ones” does not come across as “emotionally appealing or aesthetically rewarding content of a work.”
• Avoiding “caricatured” portrayals of characters — the older generation should not appear “as a source of backwardness, comic misunderstanding, helplessness, or moral pressure,” nor a mother “solely as a source of hyper-protectiveness,” nor a father “as an emotionally absent, domestically incompetent, or secondary figure.”
• Excluding “shouting scenes.”
• Conveying specific responses to key audience “insights,” such as “family and children are not the end of freedom, but a new level of life with different, deeper joys” and “early parenthood gives a chance to see great-grandparents while they are still alive.”

RBC reported that the recommendations were drafted by the State Duma’s Information Policy Committee. Committee head Sergey Boyarsky denies this, saying the committee was only shown “one of the working versions” of the recommendations. “We reviewed it. The draft recommendations are the work of the industry itself, which is trying to self-regulate and create rules of the game that are clear to itself. There’s no talk of it being mandatory,” Boyarsky added.

Vladimir Trunov, Tricolor’s director for government relations, confirmed the document is under discussion with media market participants but said the current version has not yet been adopted as final.

Russia has banned showing films that “discredit traditional spiritual and moral values” as of March 1, 2026. The ban covers not only theatrical releases but streaming services as well. Streaming platforms began censoring themselves in advance of the ban: title cards warning that certain scenes have been cut have begun appearing in films posted on Russian streaming services.