Russia’s hottest rap star is literally burning up right now

Lucifer

2019

Husky is one of the sharpest and most authentic voices of contemporary Russian rap. His delivery is jerky and neurotic, his messages cryptic yet cutting deep for tens of thousands of fans across the country. But there’s is more to it than just rap. Husky is a cultural powerhouse which embodies the sincerity, the bitter irony, and the spiritual longing which comes with being young in Russia today. The ATAKA51 collective has not only contributed to the myth, but created a complex visual universe around it. Make sure you’re ready to dive into it headlong.

ATAKA51 consists of three directors – Alexander Epikhov, Dmitry Gorbaty, and Philipp Ivanov – and the cinematographer Sergey Medvedev. They’d known Husky for a couple of years when they started considering creating a project which would “conflict with reality, deceive it, and ask questions about the boundaries of truth and reflect on it.”

In the summer of 2018, Husky walked into his studio and said: “Maybe you can help kill me? I would like to officially register myself as dead so everyone could forget about me.” This was the starting point of Lucifer. “We wrote a narrative of Husky’s creative crisis, the destruction of his conceptual album, and his subsequent spiritual journey. As a result we created a documentary that is absolutely fictional,” ATAKA51 states.

“There are two narratives in our film. One, which is simple and clear, is a universal story of searching for oneself in present day reality,” the directors continue. “The other is what the viewer doesn’t know: a collection of manipulative and misleading information. In a sense, the viewer becomes the main character of our film, a person piecing together and speculating on lost scraps of information, fake news, personal reflections, and aspirations not knowing what to believe or doubt: a hero through whom we aimed at exploring the limits of narrative in the post-truth era.”

Video: ATAKA51

Text: Anastasiia Fedorova