Directors of the Future. Individualists and Universalists

"Directors of the Future" is a book about people whose works, from the perspective of film critic Andrei Plakhov, open a new chapter in the history of cinema. Many of them have already achieved success: they are widely known, recognized with the highest awards, but their relevance is not solely explained by this. In an era when cinema increasingly turns into a mechanism and a product of industry, they each find their own way to say something new, equally understandable to both elite and mass audiences. Being universalists, they remain individualists, embodying a fundamentally different type of filmmaker — one who does not engage in open confrontation with the mainstream but freely balances on the intersection of different genre traditions and styles. Among them are Sofia Coppola, Fatih Akin, Alexei German Jr., Kirill Serebrennikov, Steven Soderbergh, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, Michel Gondry, Matteo Garrone, and other masters, in whose works, despite all the technological storms of the 21st century, a new reality breathes anew.