Talking with Yevgeni Lavrentyev is like walking into a Tolstoy novel: The characters will launch into monologues that can take up an entire page, but ultimately they have their own agenda on what to say, or not.
The 33-year-old writer/director of "Countdown" is wonderfully laconic and at the same time verbose. He will readily say he voted for Russian President Vladimir Putin and how he agrees wholeheartedly with the Russian government's military policies. He did, however, evade the question of how he feels about Chechnya.
This work was made with the full support (financial and otherwise) of the Russian military -- so Chechnya, unsurprisingly, is a no-go topic.