Father
A dividing line between two worlds
Directed by Nick Denisov
Nick Denisov’s latest music video Father immerses viewers in a surreal world of absence and longing. Created for the haunting song by SBP4 and AIGEL, Denisov calls the project one that “unearthed something hidden in me, forcing me to confront the subject.”
Through the eyes of a child grappling with the loss of a father sent to an unjust war, the video explores abandonment, connection, and cycles of fatherlessness. Combining political critique with personal reflection, Father is a poetic search for acceptance.
Known for music videos for hip-hop and indie artists, theatre documentaries for Okko TV, and collaborations with creatives like Omar Jones and Mariano Vivanco, Denisov crafts experimental worlds that merge fiction and reality - a vision brought vividly to life in Father.
Father explores themes of fatherlessness and abandonment, inspired by political turmoil and personal history. Can you share how your own experiences influenced the inspiration behind this video?
I grew up without a father, and if he walked past me on the street tomorrow or even spoke to me, I wouldn’t recognise him. When someone has been absent since you were two years old, you don’t really think about it—you’ve spent your entire conscious life growing up in a world parallel to theirs. I had no personal point of reference for understanding what it meant to have a father, so I couldn’t feel anything about it either.
I was fortunate not to compare my situation to others’ too often, which made me feel as though fatherlessness hadn’t touched me or disadvantaged me. In a way, the song by SBP4 and AIGEL unearthed something hidden in me, forcing me to confront the subject.
The song opened my eyes to just how many similar stories surround me. I also realised how few projects in Eastern Europe address this theme, making fatherlessness an overlooked, unresolved issue within our collective consciousness. It’s a problem we’ve normalised to the point where children and mothers are left to cope with it on their own. At its core, fatherlessness is an unresolved problem of the past that a child must confront and address before becoming a parent themselves. As someone who may one day be a father, it is important for me to understand how to break the cycle.
How did the collaboration with AIGEL’s Aigel Gaisina and SBP4’s Kirill Ivanov come about for this music video?
I had wanted to collaborate with Kirill for a long time, but previous projects didn’t come together, mostly due to logistical or financial challenges. About six months before this video, I was pitching a treatment for a British artist based on a POV format. At the time, I felt that POV had become an overused technique — more of a visual gimmick than a storytelling tool. The breakthrough came when I thought about framing the POV through the lens of a peephole. This approach could hint at both the perspective of a person looking through the peephole and that of the peephole itself as an inanimate observer.
This evolved into a visually charged story about a peephole that, overwhelmed by the events in the hallway, runs away.
Although the label ultimately chose a different treatment for the British project, I felt a renewed confidence in the idea and knew I would turn it into a short film or a music video for another artist. Almost unchanged, I sent the concept to SBP4. Kirill connected so deeply with the idea that, instead of following the usual process of matching a video concept to a pre-selected track, we started exploring songs from their album to fit my idea.
SBP4’s work often feels like an ongoing dialogue between childhood and adulthood, a connection present in every track. In “Father,” a child reflects on a toxic relationship with their father, yet the narrator’s voice already carries the weight and maturity of an adult. Aigel’s verse, performed in Tatar, brings a unique cultural lens to the track too.
How did you develop the idea to use the peephole as a visual motif? With its limited perspective, it feels like another character in the film - witnessing the world but disconnected from it.
A child’s world is deeply shaped by their guides — their parents. It’s through them that a child first encounters the surrounding environment. When a father is absent, the child’s ability to see or understand him narrows to a tiny crack, barely wide enough to glimpse anything at all.
The peephole serves as a dividing line between two worlds - external and internal. Using the peephole’s perspective, we adopt the role of the apartment’s inhabitant, observing events through their eyes. This assumption is subverted midway through the video when, instead of revealing the protagonist, the peephole itself escapes.
The story has echoes of Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose, where an inanimate object takes on a life of its own, offering an absurd yet poignant commentary on the human condition. Here, the peephole, unable to bear the state of the world, rejects its role as a silent observer. It becomes a way to underscore the rejection of a world where fathers are transient figures lurking in the hallway.
Did you encounter any surprising changes or decisions during editing that altered your original vision?
Initially, the parade of fathers was envisioned by me and editor Vera Romanova as a single-shot sequence, with the fathers walking down the hallway like they were on a runway. However, during pre-production, it became clear that to properly showcase the characters and maintain the rhythm, we’d need to use direct cuts.
Another challenge Vera and I faced was that, when viewed on smaller screens, the events in the hallway felt too small and distant. We worried that our characters wouldn’t be fully legible, so we experimented with versions where the peephole’s view was zoomed in during editing.
In the end, after several discussions, we decided to forgo any additional zooms in favour of a static image, even if it wasn’t magnified. The reasoning was simple: a peephole doesn’t move—at least not until it “comes to life.” In the first part of the video, it was essential to establish a truthful, hermetic world where peepholes stay still and fathers never enter their children’s lives. This grounding made the later surreal twist possible.
“It was essential to establish a truthful, hermetic world where peepholes stay still and fathers never enter their children’s lives.”
The film's use of space - especially the corridor scenes - felt claustrophobic, almost trapping the viewer in this limited world. How did you and DP Kirill Groshev use lighting and framing to enhance this sensation?
It was crucial to find a corridor that conveyed the closed-in, unchanging monotony of everyday life. Alongside DP Kirill Groshev and producer Daniel Lazarev, we spent a long time searching for a suitable residential corridor in Berlin since building a custom set in a studio wasn’t an option. We needed a hallway with a straight, receding perspective that evoked the feel of a fashion runway while maintaining a sense of claustrophobia and ordinariness. At the same time, the corridor had to be wide enough to allow two people to pass each other, like on a catwalk.
Kirill Groshev used an Optex 4mm fisheye lens to replicate the peephole effect directly during filming. To amplify this, he attached a custom-crafted filter over the lens. Using a blowtorch, he shaped the filter to create the necessary distortions and aberrations. We also scratched it with keys to enhance the worn, imperfect look.
How did you achieve the balance between personal emotion and broader social commentary in the video, and what do you hope viewers take away from Father?
Kirill Ivanov from SBP4 spent some time reading chats of relatives of Wagner PMC mercenaries. Most of the messages came from wives searching for their missing husbands. It led him to imagine what it might feel like to be the son of someone who was killed. And he experienced a wave of anger, frustration, helplessness — and despair.
Ultimately, together with SBP4 and Aigel, we dream of a world where the tragic cycle of fatherlessness — prevalent in our country and across the globe — finally breaks. Where every father, not just the fortunate few, can look their child in the eyes and say something like: “I’m here for you. I’m not going anywhere. I love you. I want to talk to you about everything, watch you grow every day, and cherish this life where I can be your support. I want to treasure your life too, a miracle I’m lucky to be a part of.”
Through Father, we hoped to capture the deeply personal emotions of absence and while reflecting on the systemic and generational pain caused by cycles of disconnection. I hope viewers leave with both a sense of urgency to break (or rather fix) these cycles and the belief that such change is possible.
You present a poetic world in Father, yet its themes are grounded in painful truths. How important is experimentation in your work, and does it help you communicate stories that go beyond conventional boundaries?
My experimentation often emerges at the intersection of documentary and artistic storytelling, creating works that don’t fully belong to either genre. In this video, for example, we worked with both actors and real Berliners — passersby and locals — which gave us authentic textures and unfamiliar faces. The aim was to weave our “fathers” into a tangible documentary world and convince the viewer that such characters truly exist — that this is no fiction.
We filmed in subway platforms and public spaces, and at times, I would look closely at unfamiliar passersby and believe they were fake, fictional characters with unnatural, illogical appearances. Then I would look at our actors and believe that they were actually the real citizens. And then the opposite would happen, and I’d believe the reverse. It’s at this boundary between forms, where no clear lines exist, that I find the most exciting creative opportunities.
What’s next for you?
You can surely expect my continuous attempts to deal with this reality in peculiar ways through film. I don’t know what you can make of this promise but something will come out for sure.
Nick Denisov
Writer, Director
Daniel Lazarev
Executive Producer
Misha Kulikov
Producer
Kirill Groshev
Director of Photography
Vera Romanova
Editor
Christian Eschmann
Key Cast
Yuriy Davydov
Key Cast
Felix Lampert
Key Cast
Maksim Avdeev
Key Cast
Alexey Mironov
Key Cast
Konrad Paszek
Key Cast
Nevzat Güllüce
Key Cast