How to Save a Dead Friend review – moving Russian anthem for doomed youth

At the age of 16, in 2005, Marusya Syroechkovskaya was already certain that she would die young. “Everyone knows Russia’s for the depressed,” she would say, as she witnessed her circle of adolescent friends succumb, one by one, to a terrible cycle of drug addiction and suicidal despair. Her teenage world shifted, however, when she met her twin flame in Kimi Morev, a blond-haired boy with sensitive features that belie deep sorrows. Composed of personal footage shot over a decade, Syroechkovskaya’s moving documentary is both a hymn to a troubled soul and a portrait of a lost generation.

A sense of inevitable finality permeates through every frame of the film, which opens with Morev’s funeral in 2016. At the same time, Syroechkovskaya beautifully balances darkness with light. Her loving bond with Morev sparkles across the fuzzy camcorder images, which capture the energy of hangouts among friends as well as the pure comfort of simply being together. One particularly cathartic scene shows the jubilant celebration that followed Russia’s progress in the 2008 European Championships. Streams of kids pour out on to the streets as they are united, perhaps for the first time, by a sense of patriotism and connectedness.

Such moments of joy are also fragile. Even in the midst of a holiday dinner, Syroechkovskaya’s camera wanders often towards the television set, where didactic speeches by Russian officials are played on a loop. The rigid aesthetics of such news reports are brilliantly offset by Syroechkovskaya’s playful use of early-internet desktop interface and even droll stock images to grapple with difficult topics such as self-harm and substance abuse. Immortalised in these bittersweet snapshots of euphoria and torment, Morev and his extraordinary spirit live on in Syroechkovskaya’s tender gaze.

• How to Save a Dead Friend is on True Story from 13 September.