Filmmaking in Russia in the 1980s was under the total control of the Soviet regime — at least, officially. State studio Goskino had a monopoly over what was made, and what ideas and imagery were deemed acceptable by the censors. The freedom to experiment that had fired up the ‘20s avant-garde had long been replaced by the Party-sponsored idealism of Socialist Realism, depicting heroic, strapping harvesters and fertile women glowing with health striving toward the shining heights of progress guaranteed for the future. But some artists, pushed underground and feeling far from spiritually nourished by these utopian myths, still found ways to work. Their revulsion at what they felt to be hypocrisy fermented into a punk manifestation of all that had been denied by and marginalised from propaganda’s dream.

Yevgeny Yufit was one such counter-force. He was a key driver of Russia’s unauthorised Parallel Cinema, and the loose movement that came to be known as Necrorealism. The artist from St Petersburg (then called Leningrad) has for the last few years been out of the public eye. But his strong cult following around the globe remains among fans of extreme imagination and black wit, many of whom discovered his bizarre shorts for the first time in the recesses of the internet, and cherish the shock and delight they provoke. Yufit died just before Christmas at the age of 55 in a loss not widely reported in the media, but deeply felt by those who care about radical cinema. We look back on the energy and abandon of his rule-shattering films.