Film Screening: The Master and Margarita (2024)

The Master and Margarita (2024), based on the cult classic novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, was shot in 2021, before Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine. After multiple sebacks and uncertainty if it would ever be finished, the movie was released in Russia earlier this year and became a box office sensation, despite major political controversy and fierce opposition from the government and government friendly media and propagandists. As written about in publications such as Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times andThe Guardian, writer and director Michael Lockshin was subjected to a tremendous backlash for creating what the propagandists saw as a critique of Putin’s authoritarianism and for his pro-Ukraine stance, with calls to censor the film and for criminal charges be brought against Lockshin.

The film’s edit was stopped for a full year in 2022 and subsequently the film’s release date pushed back multiple times, from the original Universal Pictures slot in December 2022. As a result, the film, if anything, became even more relevant today. Bulgakov's famous line, that "every form of power is violence over people" resonates as powerfully in today's Russia as it did in Bulgakov's USSR. The film's liberties in transposing the complex novel to screen, mixing in a layer of Bulgakov’s own biography have been equally supported by the novel’s fans and Bulgakov scholars.

Because of complexities with the film's international rights, distribution in the US is so far in limbo, but the director is hopeful that in 2025 the film will be able to come out for an international audience. The Wende Museum presents an exclusive, non-commercial screening of the film.

After the screening, Lockshin will discuss the film with Vladimir Paperny, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures at UCLA and author of Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two.