Alexei Uchitel's 1992 documentary, "Poslednii Geroi [The Last Hero]"

The Last Hero (Poslednii geroi, 1992) is a documentary film by Alexey Uchitel’, which chronicles the events in the aftermath of Viktor Tsoi’s death in a car accident in rural Latvia on August 15, 1990. This is Uchitel’s second documentary featuring the Leningrad rock music community, with the first being his 1988 documentary Rock, during which the director and his crew had to undergo a stringent vetting process by Tsoi and his band. Kino invited the film crew to spend a twenty-four-hour period at “Kamchatka,” the famous Leningrad boiler room, where Tsoi worked as a stoker and the band’s underground concerts often took place. The band stipulated that the decision to take part in Rock would be dependent on the quality of interaction between the filmmakers and the performers. Tsoi’s late widow, Marianna Tsoi, worked as an administrator for the film, which allowed Uchitel to further ingratiate himself into the rock community and witness the private lives of his characters at close range. Uchitel also maintained to have seen the actual driver of the Ikarus bus that suffered the fatal collision with Tsoi’s Moskvich, allowing for ample material to make his fictionalized account of the first days following the rock star’s death. The Last Hero includes footage of the rock star’s funeral, as well as scenes from his gravesite in the years following the death, documenting the largescale outpouring of grief from the singer’s massive fanbase. In many ways the film can be considered a sort of preemptive elegy for the Soviet rock underground, a tight-knit community, which largely disbanded after the collapse of the USSR, with musicians leaving the country, succumbing to early deaths, and/or forging recording and performing careers within the newfound post-Soviet market economy, which no longer necessitated an extensive social network. Tsoi’s funeral, therefore, was not simply a farewell ritual aimed at one performer, but rather a public mourning for a fleeting period of optimism in Soviet and Russian history.