My characters are people who are not noticed, who are physically present but visually absent. We now have social realism substituted by glamour, which offers an ideal, glossy life — life as it should be. And life as it is — that one that flows in front of everyone — again as if it does not exist, as it did not back then. And now, just like before, my challenge, and the challenge to this new ideology, is to show that it exists and what it looks like.

For my tramps, first of all, I feel compassion — as for miserable, neglected people who have lost it all. In addition to that, I often find them more likeable than “normal” people, because having lost everything, including fear, they gained freedom. On the other hand, there is something touching and vulnerable in them as in stray dogs.

Semyon Faibisovich