‘It was a very hard journey’: Master and Margarita director on its unlikely Russian success

Michael Lockshin’s film adaption of Bulgakov’s anti-censorship masterpiece has become a box office hit in Russia against all odds

In an ironic twist, Russia’s wartime box office is being dominated by a blockbuster adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, a film that denounces censorship and was filmed by an American director who is “vocally anti-war”.

One leading film critic, Anton Dolin, told the Guardian it was the “best commercial film ever shot in [Vladimir] Putin’s Russia”. A movie’s runaway success can work against it in Russia now: the film has had to run the gauntlet of pro-Kremlin propagandists and censors, and in true Hollywood fashion it has triumphed against the odds.