A Thing Happening on the Upper West Side: Russian Super Bowl. A film screening, followed by an interrogation of the text with director Alexander Golofast

The Premise (Which is inherently insane, but entirely true)

We live in a culture obsessed with optimization, winning, and the curated illusion of success. But what happens when you intentionally optimize for the bottom?

Driven by the kind of profound spiritual exhaustion that only corporate advertising can provide, a high-level marketer quits a lucrative life of global brand strategy, completely blind-tastes a map of Russia, and moves to a grey, post-industrial city called Ivanovo. The objective? Pack the stadium for a chronically losing, entirely forgotten football team called Tekstilschik. The goal was to take the hyper-local, community-driven mythology of American sports fandom and forcibly graft it onto Russian culture.

The filmmaker arrived on February 23, 2022. If you know anything about modern history, you know that hours later, the world fundamentally changed. The war began, instantly isolating Russia from the Western world for decades to come, leaving the entire cross-cultural experiment suspended in midair.

Completely independent, self-financed, and operating on the exact same grim timeline as the Oscar-winning documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin, Russian Super Bowl (an official selection of Art Doc Fest 2025) looks at the exact same society but through a completely inverted lens. It asks a deeply human question: Is failure actually the final gateway to transcendence? When our grand plans completely disintegrate under the weight of geopolitical trauma, the pretense is stripped away, leaving behind the only thing that actually matters—genuine, raw human connection.

About the Director

Before turning to filmmaking, Alexander Golofast engineered the things that dictate how modern desire is processed. Having built campaigns for Coca-Cola and Reebok, he is most famously responsible for Reebok’s viral, internet-breaking “Out of Control” campaign — the one that subverted mainstream corporate packaging by pairing a sterile global aesthetic with an underground feminist blogger’s explosive declaration: “Stop sitting on the needle of men’s approval and sit on men’s faces.”

Realizing commercial metrics felt empty, he pivoted to an independent documentary style he calls “preaching and pranking.” Heavily indebted to the cultural taxonomy of Adam Curtis, the hyper-observational anxiety of John Wilson, and the reality-testing of Nathan Fielder, his work actively manipulates the real world to uncover hidden philosophical truths. It lives in that beautiful, deeply uncomfortable gray area where it is hard to tell if you are looking at a masterpiece of sociological observation or a highly sophisticated, multi-layered joke. (Spoiler: It’s both.)

Watch the trailer here: https://youtu.be/ezxGyjoE-so?si=qlFQByCNy60K1dEr

Come to White Rabbit’s Books on October 1. Watch the film. Let’s talk about sports, failure, the collapse of expectations, and what it looks like when history crashes into a prank.

Participation fee: $10, which will go toward supporting and developing the White Rabbit space.