Locarno: where the soul has wings
“Gerda” by Natalya Kudryashova is a clash of a delicate, innocent soul with wild everyday life in which one has to fight for survival.
“Gerda” by Natalya Kudryashova is a clash of a delicate, innocent soul with wild everyday life in which one has to fight for survival.
The young philology student, Ilja, is – without any special reason, except for pure malice – set up by the young agent of the drug department, Piotr, who is acting under cover. Ilja goes to prison for seven long years.
Lungin based his film on a simple tension associated with time running out. Here comes the order to demobilize the forces and come home, but one pilot – being the son of the general – was kidnapped by Afghans. The race against time begins.
The Sun Above Me Never Sets is a film which is much closer to young, independent American cinema from Sundance than to Russian filmmakers, even though it sounds like a Yakut travesty of the film How I Ended This Summer by Alexei Popogrebsky from 2010.
In Beanpole, the Russian candidate for the Academy Award, the world is drawn exactly as Dutch paintbrush masters have done it so many years ago. This is the world of ordinary women performing ordinary activities in soft light, which timidly bursts through the windows into the charming rooms of Leningrad’s tenement houses.
A simple, immature story could become a picture of the late coming of age of lonely sensitive person, who is unable to find herself in a foreign world, if not for the narcissistic focus on self and tedious display of artist’s painting and vocal skills stretched for several dozen minutes (it is a relief that it wasn’t longer!).
The Lord Eagle directed by Eduard Nowikow is the second film in recent times – after Milko Lazarov’s Ága – about very similar, if not twin, themes.
Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Ajka is a movie that almost completely reduces the distance between the viewer, camera and its heroine. This closeness, shots from behind, stubbornly following after Ajka (Jolanta Dylewska’s camerawork) and the concentration of more and more obstacles on her path can be associated on the one hand with the poetics of movies filmed in one mastershot, and on the other hand with raw film realism.
The narrative layer of Jumpman, can be watched as a monochrome negative of Xavier Dolan’s Mother. Here, instead of learning responsibility, there will be a desire to prey on other person, and instead of forging difficult love – the murderous specificity of the Russian system will be transplanted into family relations.