Programs in Circulation
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Dir. Evgeny Solomin,
Russia, 2009, 43 min
All Soviet passports have to be replaced by Russian identity papers. This means lots of work for an unusual photographer with bushy eyebrows, a round, wrinkly head, and an immaculate handlebar moustache. He travels along barely passable roads of mud to remote villages in Siberia to provide everyone with a new passport photograph. We follow him everywhere: at home, on the road, and at work, in a succession of static, black-and-white shots. The film camera focuses on bystanders or the interior, or shows the final photographs while we hear the process that led to their taking. Old women pour out their hearts to the photographer, complaining about aching knees; a man says that, apart from an advance, he hasn't been paid in eight years; the photographer compliments a young woman, and lends a couple of workmen his jacket. After all, they have to look a bit respectable for the camera. Replete with observations of everyday life, the film provides an impression of a tough, simple, and above all old-fashioned existence. Whether the new passports will also bring modern Russian culture to this simple life remains to be seen.
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Dir. Andrei Khrzhanovsky
Russia, 2009, color; 130 min., in Russian with English subtitles
When asked in an interview whether he ever intended to return to his Motherland, Joseph Brodsky replied: "Such a journey could only take place anonymously..."
The creators of this film imagined that the journey in question was undertaken after all, selecting the genre of an ironic fairytale. The poet sails to the country of his childhood, and with him we traverse not only geographical expanses, but travel through time as well; stringing together a number of facts from the Nobel Prize Laureate's biography, we return to the USSR of the 50s and early 60s, soaking up the atmosphere of the "European" city of Petersburg, to this day Russia's cultural center. Read more»
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