The revered cinematographer was making an apocalyptic musical with Tilda Swinton deep in a salt mine when he realised he had to flee. Can he now save his son?

It was March 2022 and Joshua Oppenheimer was waiting at Copenhagen airport for the young man who would be staying with him for a few weeks. Oppenheimer, who directed two devastating Oscar-nominated documentaries about the 1965 Indonesian genocide, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, had been working closely with Russian cinematographer Mikhail Krichman. He was now preparing to make The End, an audacious musical about the last family on earth hiding in their bunker following a climate-related apocalypse in which they were complicit. And Mikhail’s 22-year-old son, Vlad, was travelling to Copenhagen to participate in a workshop addressing the challenges implicit in The End, which was to be shot partly in German and Italian salt mines.

Oppenheimer had never met Vlad before, though he knew of his joie de vivre and infectious good humour. But the young man who emerged at arrivals that day, having stepped off a flight from Moscow, cut a very different figure. “He looked terrible,” the director recalls. “He was pale. He was stuttering. He was traumatised. It was frankly heartbreaking. I asked him, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘I can’t go back.’”