A fascinating and human portrayal of a once-famous fighter pilot and loyal Stalinist named Nadezhda Petrovna. Now a 41-year-old provincial schoolmistress, she has so internalized the military ideas of service and obedience that she cannot adjust to life in peacetime.Read More »
Quote: The Killers is a 1956 student film by the Soviet and Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky and his fellow students Marika Beiku and Aleksandr Gordon. The film is based on the short story “The Killers” by Ernest Hemingway, written in 1927. It was Tarkovsky’s first film, produced when he was a student at the State Institute of Cinematography.Read More »
A dying man in his forties remembers his past. His childhood, his mother, the war, personal moments and things that tell of the recent history of all the Russian nation.Read More »
Synopsis The story begins when a young man with a head injury is released from the hospital and begins searching modern-day St. Petersburg for a room or a place to stay.Read More »
Quote: This visually stunning Kazakh movie tells a tragic tale of absent and misplaced compassion. A young orphan rescues an orphaned wolf cub and lavishes considerable affection on it. His uncle, believing that this “softness” will result in the boy’s being unable to endure the rigors of life on the Kazakh steppes, savagely beats the cub in front of the boy. By the time the grown wolf is released into the wild, it has grown extremely ferocious and it returns and attacks the boy, perhaps because it perceives him as being weak, just as the boy’s uncle did.Read More »
A Soviet soldier, Andrei Sokolov, has been separated with his family by World War II. Suffering in Nazi captivity, he dreams of meeting his darlings after the victory. But cruel fate turned out otherwise.Read More »
The events just before, during and after World War Two have little direct effect on the inhabitants of the village inGeorgia where Zuriko lives. A schoolboy, Zuriko goes to the schoolhouse with his previously unlettered grandmother, who is receiving an education alongside him. He has some loyal, if slightly addled friends in the person of a myopic hunter named Illarion, and a one-eyed man named Illiko. So nearsighted is Illarion that on one occasion he shot Zuriko’s dog because the took it for a rabbit. The loyalty of his friends is proven after the war, when they sell the cow they all own in order to send Zuriko to college in Tblisi. This black and white film is notable for several things: its loving portrayal of the Georgian country people and countryside, and the fact that it was made by (Tenghiz Abuladze, who went on to make the extremely significant, award-winning 1984 film Monanieba, also known as Pokayaniye, or Repentance.Read More »
The main character, which is a prototype of Kafka, is on his way to achieving true self-cognition. The impetus for this was vague childhood memories associated with emotions, as well as the identification of his identity with certain images at that period. He is facing an internal conflict, tearing him apart, between creativity and reality that are not compatible with each other.Read More »