Nina Ruslanova

  • Kira Muratova – Korotkiye vstrechi AKA Brief Encounters (1967)

    1961-1970DramaKira MuratovaUSSR

    Anna Lawton wrote:
    After a brilliant debut with Our Daily Bread (1965), co-directed with her husband Alexander Muratov, Muratova was allowed to make her own film, Brief Encounters (1967). On the surface the story was simple enough. Valentina, a conscientious civil servant in charge of the regional housing office, and Maxim, a geologist-prospector and guitar player devoted to an itinerant and adventurous life, have a difficult relationship – a series of brief encounters and lengthy separations. Their episodic meetings bring into focus their love and need for each other, but also their basic differences, disappointments, and resentment. There is a third character in this love triangle, Nadya, a country girl Valentina hires as a maid without knowing of her past relation with Maxim.Read More »

  • Aleksey German – Moy drug Ivan Lapshin AKA My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1985)

    1981-1990Aleksey GermanDramaUSSR

    Quote:
    Aleksei German’s singular, multithreaded drama My Friend Ivan Lapshin offers a uniquely stylized look at life in Russia as the flaws of Communism were just beginning to show. Set in a provincial Russian village during the 1930s, the film at times recalls the autobiographical work of Terence Davies or Woody Allen’s Radio Days. Like the work of those directors, German’s film filters most experiences through the eyes of a child, although the child/narrator in this particular movie is not present in the majority of the scenes. Read More »

  • Yuri Kara – Zavtra byla voyna AKA Tomorrow Was the War [+Extras] (1987)

    1981-1990DramaUSSRYuriy Kara

    This film is based on a novel by Boris Vasiliev and takes place in a small Russian provincial town in 1940, one year before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The every day life of class 9B is a larger than life portrait of Stalininism and of unconditional loyalty to party dogma.

    At a birthday party a girl, one of the students, recites poetry by a “bourgeois” author. The information leaks out and her liberal father is arrested as a dissident. The daughter is faced by the class teacher and asked to publicly renounce her father which leads to a tragedy. This causes both inner and outer conflicts, the colleagues start to rebel and to question their loyalty, be it to the class teacher or the soviet ideology itself.Read More »

  • Aleksey German – Khrustalyov, mashinu! AKA Khrustalyov, My Car! [+commentary] (1998)

    1991-2000Aleksey GermanComedyDramaRussia

    IMDb wrote:
    Military doctor General Klenski is arrested in Stalin’s Russia in 1953 during an anti-Semitic political campaign accused of being a participant in so-called “doctors’ plot”.

    Quote:
    Named after the apocryphal exclamation of Soviet security chief Lavrentiy Beria as he rushed to Stalin’s deathbed, this blackly funny, deliriously immersive satire distils the anticipation and anxiety in the Moscow air, as the Soviet despot lay dying.Read More »

  • Kira Muratova – Korotkie vstrechi AKA Brief Encounters (1967)

    1961-1970DramaKira MuratovaRomanceThe Female GazeUSSR

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    kinoglaz.fr:
    Nadya (Nina Ruslanova) is a young woman who loves the geologist Maxim (Vladimir Vysotsky). She takes a job as a housemaid before discovering Maxim is romantically involved with town official Valentina Ivanovna (Kira Muratova). The heartbroken Nadya goes away before Maxim can return, leaving him and Valentina to pursue their romance.

    imdb:
    Nadja, a country girl moves to the city and becomes Valya’s maid. Valya, a member of the District Soviet, does not know that Nadja fell in love with Valya’s currently absent husband, a geologist, when he was at her village on a recent expedition. Written by Erik Gregersen {[email protected]}Read More »

  • Aleksey German – Khrustalyov, mashinu! AKA Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998)

    1991-2000Aleksey GermanArthouseDramaUSSR

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    Winter is never-ending in Aleksei Guerman’s impenetrable film ”Khroustaliov, My Car!,” a nearly two-and-a-half hour absurdist nightmare of life in the Soviet Union during the final days of Stalin’s rule. Snow falls in almost every scene of this starkly grim, black-and-white movie, which follows the triumph, fall from grace and hasty rehabilitation of a hulking Red Army general and brain surgeon named Yuri Glinshi (Yuri Tsourilo). Processions of black government vehicles are forever materializing like ominous phantoms through the curtains of snow that drift over a dilapidated town decorated with gleaming white statues of the beady-eyed, mustached Soviet dictator.Read More »

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