AFP/Moscow

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has told Russia’s top directors that Russian movies were not attracting big enough foreign audiences and the domestic film industry had to raise its game.

Proving himself capable of talking tough on culture as much as politics, Putin said that despite state support Russian movies were not sufficiently popular abroad and therefore did not promote the country.

“We possess a most rich cinematographic heritage, our films traditionally receive prestigious awards at international festivals but our product does not so far have a mass foreign audience,” he said.

That meant that “the goals of economic, cultural and humanitarian influence are not being reached”, he told the first meeting of the recently-created Council on Cinematography.

“And that’s one of the most important, serious tasks of domestic filmmaking.

“There’s always little money but there are even fewer good ideas and talented works,” he told the meeting at the country’s top film school, the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography.

Before the meeting, Putin was given a tour of the institute’s several filmmaking pavilions, where the strongman premier tried his hand at producing sound effects and walked on bags of starch to imitate the crunch of snow under feet.

At the meeting, Putin told directors, including Oscar-winning film director Nikita Mikhalkov, Vladimir Khotinenko and Karen Shakhnazarov, to learn from how Hollywood managed to take advantage of the financial crisis in the 1930s.

“The Great Depression in the US has given a very important impulse to the development of the American cinematography and made this industry super-profitable,” Putin said.

Despite political constraints, filmmaking thrived in the Soviet Union and a number of directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky earned renown in the West for pushing the boundaries of the genre.

But after the collapse of the Soviet Union the previously generous levels of funding withered, leading to a general downturn in the industry.