Russian

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 »

The rival of a worker on a Cossack stud farm exposes him during the war as a Nazi and rescues the owner’s daughter from a train about to be blown up by partisans.Read More »

How will the relations of the two neighbors develop, after all, one of them is the head of the criminal investigation department, and the other is a criminal repeat offender.Read More »

Dnevnye Zvyozdy (“The Stars of the Day”, 1966) was based on poetess Olga Berggolts’s autobiography. She was a difficult figure for the authorities: though she stayed in Leningrad during the siege making inspirational radio broadcasts, her more personal work was suppressed, even after her death. Suspended strangely between interior monologue, poetic recitation, exterior action and memory, it won an award at the Venice Film Festival. It also introduced Talankin to the actress Alla Demidova, who appeared in most of his subsequent films.Read More »

ASSA is set in Crimea during the winter in the mid eighties. A young musician (Bananan) falls for mobster’s (Krymov) young mistress (Alika). The parallel story line involves an 18th century assassination plot.Read More »

A 1964 Soviet film directed by Georgiy Daneliya and produced by Mosfilm studios. It stars Nikita Mihalkov, Aleksei Loktev, Jevgeny Steblov and Galina Polskikh. The film also features cameos by four People’s Artists of the USSR: Rolan Bykov, Vladimir Basov, Lev Durov, and Inna Churikova.

The famous movie theme, performed by Mikhalkov, was written by the composer Andrej Petrov. The film, regarded as one of the most characteristic of the Khrushchev Thaw, premiered at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival and won a prize for the work of cameraman Vadim Yusov, best known for his subsequent collaboration with Andrei Tarkovsky.Read More »

Wikipedia wrote:
Dead Man’s Letters (Russian: Письма мёртвого человека, romanized: Pis’ma myortvogo cheloveka), also known as Letters from a Dead Man, is a 1986 Soviet post-apocalyptic drama film directed and written by Konstantin Lopushansky. He wrote it along with Vyacheslav Rybakov and Boris Strugatsky. It marks his directorial debut.

The film was screened at the International Critics’ Week section of the Cannes Film Festival in 1987 and received the FIPRESCI prize at the 35th International Filmfestival Mannheim-Heidelberg.Read More »

Singer Oksana has lost her beloved in the war. Everyone thinks he perished, but actually he was taken prisoner, then ran away, hid, fell into American hands, and… Finally, he returns to his village, and meets Oksana.Read More »

A major foreshadowing of Paradjanov’s later work, the visually prodigious Andriesh is an entertaining tale about a young shepherd who is given a magic shawm (a flutelike instrument) to help him conquer his foes. With its flying sheep, evil wizards, and storm demons—all captured in the gloriously artifical palette of fifties Soviet color stock—Andriesh has the kind of eye-popping, whirlwind weirdness of Paradjanov’s last films, Suram Fortress and Ashik Kerib.Read More »