Terrible Brilliant

Facts

Year

2017

Runtime

1h 7m (67 min)

Format

Feature · Independent

Genres

DramaIndependentUkrainian cinemaArt-house

Language

Russian

Location

Kharkiv, Ukraine

Director

Sasha Poberailo

IMDb

tt7728832

Themes

• Campus corruption as routine

  Bribes, “closed” courses, and session-season deals are treated as ordinary infrastructure of the university, not as a single scandal. The film watches how a system of small payments and favours becomes a career path.

• Ambition and moral corrosion

  The protagonist wants money and status (“upstairs”) more than a clean reputation. Each shortcut looks rational in the moment; together they redraw what he is willing to sell — grades, influence, intimacy, self-respect.

• University as marketplace

  Exams, ZNO-adjacent pressure, student–teacher hierarchy, and private negotiations turn the campus into a bazaar. Knowledge is less the product than access, grades, and proximity to power.

• Gender, desire, and leverage

  Several women move through the lecturer’s orbit — students, partners, encounters that double as emotional and social capital. Desire is rarely free of calculation inside the same economy of favours.

• Guerrilla form / contingency

  Shot without a locked script on real Kharkiv locations, the film’s method mirrors its subject: provisional deals, improvised scenes, progressive shooting. Form is part of the argument — independent Ukrainian cinema as practice under constraint.

Characters

• The lecturerProtagonist

  Max Lavrinenko

  A young university instructor who dreams of success and cash. He takes bribes to close subjects, works side channels of influence, and tries to climb while several relationships orbit the same summer of bad decisions. Performance stays close to body language — phone calls, handshakes, classroom posture — more than to speeches about morality.

• Students & examineesCampus counterparts

  Collective figure of those who need grades, sessions closed, and access. They are clients and pressure at once: without them the lecturer’s side economy collapses; with them it becomes daily work.

• Senior men of the systemGatekeepers / colleagues

  Older male figures in corridors and deals — administrators, peers, or intermediaries who model how power is exchanged with a handshake. They embody the already-installed order the protagonist wants to join rather than reform.

• Women in his orbitIntimate / social network

  Several women appear across apartments, streets, and encounters as the lecturer navigates desire and status. They are not a single “love interest” plot so much as a map of how private life and career schemes share the same summer.

Scene map

• Classroom / blackboard

  Institute interiors: green board, desk, textbooks — the public face of the lecturer as “brilliant” teacher while the private economy of marks runs underneath.

• Corridor handshakes

  Institutional hallways as deal space — greetings that double as negotiations with older men of the system.

• Phone & suit exteriors

  City and courtyard beats of the ambitious young man in a jacket, always mid-call or mid-pitch — mobility without stability.

• Private rooms & summer outdoors

  Apartments, parks, rail-side grass: intimate and idle time that still sits inside the same arc of compromise and self-performance.