Whether conceived as art, propaganda, or entertainment for the masses, cinema has held a central position in Russian culture and society for over a century. Lenin’s famous declaration that, “of all the arts, the most important for us is cinema” has long been reflected in the Russian/Soviet state’s ideological and financial investment in the cinema. So too has it been evidenced by Russian audience attendance levels, which, up until the 1990s, consistently remained among the highest in the world per capita. In the early 1990s, however, a series of cultural and economic changes resulting from the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to an unprecedented period of decline for the Russian film industry. In spite of this, many prominent critics and filmmakers faulted a ‘weak cinema mythology’ for the dwindling state of their national film industry, and called for filmmakers to create a new national mythology to lift the spirits of the Russian people and reinstate the cultural and economic weight Russian cinema once held on a national and international level. In 1992, Daniil Dondurei, chief editor of the foremost Russian film journal Iskusstvo kino, called for Russian filmmakers to “create a new national hero” instead of “wasting time on films […] that simply reopen wounds.” In 1998, during his address to the Russian Filmmakers’ Union Congress, acclaimed Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov advocated the “creation of a positive film hero” to help restore Russian cinema to its former glory (qtd. in Hashamova 296). Numerous Russian filmmakers, including Mikhalkov himself with his ‘heritage films’ Burnt By The Sun (1996) and The Barber of Siberia (1999), as well as Alexander Sokurov, with his groundbreaking epic Russian Ark (2002), heeded this call in fashioning new, positive national myths and heroes that “idealize Russia’s imperial past and culture” (Hashamova 296). Alexei Balabanov’s post-Soviet films, on the other hand, with their macabre forays into the realms of pornography, exploitation, criminality and the Russian mafia, carve out a markedly alternative mode of post-Soviet cinema. Rather than offer a nostalgic view of Russian history and culture, his films-furnished with a host of ‘freakish’ and unsavoury characters far from the kind of ‘heroes’ Dondurei and Mikhalkov envisioned-cast a bleak light on Russia’s imperial past and propose no new national mythologies for the future.