Sberbank enabled by deepfake to move 1970s film character unchanged into ad video

By Andrei Skvarsky.

Russia’s biggest lender Sberbank, using deepfake technology, has shot a humour-tinged video in which a character who is transferred unchanged from a 1973 Soviet comedy film advertises a variety of services offered by the bank’s ecosystem.

Petty burglar George Miloslavsky comes from the movie Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession, also known in the West as Ivan Vasilievich: Back to the Future, into the Sberbank footage to list facilities that he enjoys and that include a banking app, telemedicine, and taxi service.

Leonid Kuravlyov, the actor who played Miloslavsky in the 1973 film and is 84 today, looks no different in the video than he did in the old comedy.

His speech in the video was synthesised by a Sberbank subsidiary from soundtracks in films of decades ago that starred him.

Sberbank, which is currently rebranding itself as Sber, obtained permission to the advert from Kuravlyov and bought the rights to use his image.

Ivan Vasilievich Changes His Profession is based on a play by Mikhail Bulgakov, author of the novel The Master and Margarita.

In the movie, an engineer who has created a time machine falls asleep and dreams that he is using the machine to send two men back to the times of Ivan the Terrible and bring the 16th-century Russian tsar to 1970s Moscow.

Miloslavsky is one of the men who travel back to Ivan’s days. He is accidentally caught by the time machine while robbing the flat of one of the engineer’s neighbours.

During one scene, he holds up a bunch of banknotes he has just picked up in the flat and famously quotes a Soviet slogan, “Fellow Citizens, keep your money in the Savings Bank”. He adds, “If you have any, of course.”

Savings Bank was Sberbank’s Soviet-era name.

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