Egermense

I started a television channel at my gymnasium in Ufa and ran it for four years. Forty-five films by the end. The first season went out under the tag #20central_TV, and later the channel took the name it still has.

Whatever a school year produces, we filmed: the first of September, Teachers' Day, the autumn fair, a KVN quarter-final, a folklore festival, the fiftieth anniversary of the gymnasium, a road safety spot. Lengths ran from a twenty-two second promo to an hour and twenty minutes of a gala show.

I shot all of it, cut all of it and drew every thumbnail. Nobody handed out assignments and nobody checked the result. That is the part that taught me most: something published on a schedule has to keep looking like itself, and deciding what that looked like was my job too.

Most of the titles are in Bashkir. It is my first language, and a school channel speaking it was never in question.

This is the first thing I made that had to come out whether or not I felt like it. Everything I have cut since started here.