Red Africa [2022]

 Red Africa – a kaleidoscopic compilation of astounding footage – operated in the porous intersection of political reportage, myth making and dry satire. Alexander Markov achieved this magnetic balance by meticulously stitching together singular historical artefacts in the form of a subtly shape-shifting tapestry that begun, and ran for most parts, as a disarmingly straight-faced peek into a relatively lesser-known side of Cold War history, and only much later revealed its darkly ironic stance. In a bold formal choice, it’s fully bereft of narrations and expositions. Instead, this dazzling documentary collage – based on footage shot by Soviet filmmakers in various African countries and back home from 1957 to 1991 – organically and diagetically contextualized the images, and in turn their meanings, interpretations and significances. In the 1960s, a wave of independence swept through a slew of African countries after years of colonial subjugation; in parallel, they also found a seemingly unlikely comrade from a far-flung place. The Soviet Union, in its strategic choice of courting the global south, made emphatic overtures towards these newly liberated countries that were in immediate need of patronage. The film, through its engrossing archival footage, documented the economic, industrial, educational, cultural and political exchanges that the Soviet Union had with these countries. Having experienced contempt and exploitation from the western world so far, this unanticipated display of alliance won them over, and consequently paved way for their inclusion into the socialist sphere of influence; that is, until the stunning dissolution of the USSR – and the Soviet Bloc in general – around 1989 and 1990. This reversal was captured in the film’s tone too, as the lyricism and lilting score got replaced with an edgy palette and grungy music.

Director: Alexander Markov

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History

Language: Russian

Country: Russia

I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba) [1964]

 Produced by Mosfilm in collaboration with ICAIC to celebrate the Cuban Revolution, and made when the Cold War was at its frostiest nadir – the Bay of Pigs invasion had just been foiled, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its craziest peak – Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba was a dizzying, flamboyant, poetic and rousing political agitprop. Yet, ironically, it resonated neither with the Soviets nor the Cubans at the time, and was largely forgotten until its triumphant “rediscovery” by American cinephiles in the 1990s. The omnibus film, set in pre-Castro Cuba, nonchalantly glorified the country’s rebellious streak and revolutionary path through four episodes, where the respective protagonists representing diverse socioeconomic contexts – a young exploited prostitute in a decadent Havana hotel; an impoverished sugarcane farmer whose farms are sold off to the United Fruit Company; an angry student battling against the city’s despotic police alongside his guerrilla comrades; and a devastated farmer turned rebel in the Sierra Maestra mountains – are all at loggerheads with Batista’s draconian system. Sergey Urusevsky’s dazzling cinematography – filled with technical wizardry, bravura single takes, hallucinatory images crafted using wide-angle and infrared photography, oblique camera angles – made this an idiosyncratic tour de force. Its most jaw-dropping tracking shots included  the camera gliding with a fisherman along a narrow canal between shanty houses; capturing a beauty contest atop a crowded skyscraper, traveling down and plunging into a pool; slipping into a traveling bus and culminating with a 360-degree pan-zoom showing a guy’s getting off it, crossing the streets and walking into Havana University; and moving up from a packed lane into a cigar manufacturing unit, flying out of its balcony, and soaring like a bird observing a funeral procession.

Director: Mikhail Kalatozov

Genre: Drama/Anthology Film/Political Agitprop

Language: Spanish

Country: Cuba/Russia

Unclenching the Fists [2021]

 Ada (Milana Aguzarova), a deeply conflicted, vulnerable and troubled young Muslim woman – the protagonist in Kira Kovalenko’s Unclenching the Fists – is haunted by the past and oppressed by the present; she’s inextricably bound to her overbearing family, while furiously desirous of breaking free; she wants to explore her womanhood, but is held back by fear, shame and denial of agency. These complex dualities formed the crux of this bleak, lyrical and defiantly feminist film that, through its claustrophobic story, covered a woman’s aching cry for liberation amidst political violence, societal alienation and stifling patriarchy. Ada lives with her domineering, over-protective father (Alik Karaev) who she’s desperate to escape from, and her younger brother who’s disturbingly close to her, in the desolate former mining town of Mizur in Russia’s North Ossetia region. She pines for her elder brother (Soslan Khugaev), who’s relocated for work, to return and take her away, while also torn by the amorous overtures of a goofy loafer. Her social construct was further complicated by allusions to the Chechen-Russian conflict, and the 2004 Beslan school hostage tragedy in particular where the siege by Chechen rebels was crushed by the state with brutal iron-fist, leading to 333 deaths, including that of 186 children. Ada was one of the students who survived the bloody massacre; however, she still carries the painful physical scars and debilitating psychological trauma which has made it profoundly difficult for her to have physical intimacy with anyone. Aguzarova gave a stunningly assured, courageous and ferocious turn in this bold directorial work by the second student of celebrated filmmaker Alexander Sokurov – after her batchmate Kantemir Balagov who made Beanpole two years back – to achieve international recognition.

Director: Kira Kovalenko

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Family Drama

Language: Ossetian

Country: Russia

Petrov's Flu [2021]

 Petrov’s Flu, Kirill Serebrennikov’s first production since his release from house arrest – ostensibly on charges of embezzlement, though allegedly as retaliation for his outspokenness – was at once grand and intimate, and in turn alternatively brash, flamboyant, nightmarish, anarchic, surreal, poignant and personal. And this staggering tonal breadth was accompanied by bravura filmmaking, formal audacity, freewheeling structure and thrilling fusion of a myriad political, historical, pop-culture and psychoanalytic symbols. Adapted from Alexey Salnikov's novel Petrovy v Grippe, this dizzying fever dream of a movie portrayed a day in the life of its titular protagonist – albeit one that stretched and twisted like a hyper-elastic rubber band – started on a chaotic note and became deliriously eccentric as the unpredictable narrative progressed, and switched between “real” and Freudian netherworld – a cesspool of paranoias, fantasies, desires, hallucinations, memories – at breathtaking frequency. Petrov (Semyon Serzin) is a comic book artist losing his sense of sanity while on the grip of a nasty flu in a volatile, pandemic-stricken Russian society. The frenzied night begins with him on a violently chaotic bus ride and joining an anarchist group eliminating wealthy oligarchs, and things kept going bonkers thereon. His librarian wife (Chulpan Khamatova), conversely, often transforms into a murderous superwoman. Meanwhile, as this otherwise struggling couple are arguing about taking their kid to a Christmas party, we’re taken into Petrov’s repressed memories – involving a striking, emotionally vulnerable woman (Yulia Peresild) with a sexually fertile mind – who he’s haunted by. Dazzling images of messy exteriors and sterile interiors, sepia-toned recollections, and muted B/W sections, coupled with an eclectic score – ranging from grungy heavy rock to mournful accordion-led folk tunes – made this unhinged work all the more visceral and fascinating.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Kirill Serebrennikov

Genre: Black Comedy/Surreal Comedy/Social Satire/Existentialist Drama

Language: Russian

Country: Russia

DAU. Natasha [2020]

 The scale, faux-authenticity and ambition behind the DAU project – conceived by Ilya Khrzhanovsky initially as a biopic of Soviet physicist Lev Landau, before it grew to gargantuan proportions – operated in the realms of unbridled megalomania. This massive replication of clandestine Soviet-era research institute as a microcosmic representation of Stalinist totalitarianism, involved a colossal 12,000 m² set built in Ukraine where hundreds of cast members lived 24/7 for years under constant surveillance, shrouded in secrecy and cut-off from the outside world. DAU. Natasha – one of the 13 films that’ve emerged so far out of this project which has been likened as a real-life evocation of Truman Show and Synecdoche, New York – is a relentlessly grim, intensely harrowing and unapologetically provocative work; and, while it works well as a standalone film, the context, behind-the-scenes machinations, and overlaps between “real” and enactment made it even more viscerally disturbing. Natasha (Natalia Berezhnaya) is a middle-aged woman who works at the institute’s cafeteria – frequented by physicists and military personnel working there – along with the much younger Olga (Olga Shkabaryna). They share a volatile relationship – Natasha is disdainful of Olga’s callowness and laziness, and jealous of her youth and beauty; Olga, in turn, yearns for acceptance from her older compatriot while also, upon provocation, mocking her hardy appearance and prudishness – and hence they alternate between sentimental conversations over alcohol and scorching hostility when drunk. However, when Natasha has a brief but graphic fling with Luc (Luc Bigé) – a visiting scientist conducting bizarre human experiments – post a night of drunken revelry, she’s summoned by the clinically ruthless security head (Vladimir Azhippo) for a grotesque session of interrogation for the transgression and enlisting her as a spy.

 

 

 

 

 

Directors: Ilya Khrzhanovsky & Jekaterina Oertel

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama

Language: Russian/English

Country: Russia

Hard to Be a God [2013]

 Grisly, grimy, gut-wrenching, grueling – one might run out of gangrenous adjectives while describing Hard to be a God, the gargantuan final film of Aleksei German, and one in which he invested nearly 15 years of his life until his death (it was released posthumously through the efforts of his wife and son). Possibly best known until this for My Friend Ivan Lapshin – his bleak, freewheeling adaptation of stories written by his father – this is a work that’s bound to leave one gutted with its unsettling imagery of a medieval-era civilization at its most hideous, putrefying and barbaric… or, allegorically, humanity at the nadir of its humanism. On surface, though, this was a sci-fi film; adapted from Soviet writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel, it’s set in an exoplanet to which a group of scientists have come from Earth in order to observe and study its inhabitants who’re stuck in the vicious loop of the middle ages due to the brutal suppression of a renaissance movement in its bud through the collective massacre of intellectuals, artists and scientists. One of those scientists (Leonid Yarmolnik) has infiltrated the dominant local kingdom where he’s established himself as a nobleman / some sort of a god, and must somehow survive the violent inter-faction rivalries (between the tyrannical “Greys” and fanatical “Blacks”), atrocity against the intelligentsia, rampant slavery and public executions, while also trying to save a supposed intellectual within this quagmire. Through stark B/W photography and on-location realism German created a hellish world filled with decay, squalour, muck and savagery, and in turn provided a metaphorical alternative portraiture of human civilization when stripped of the civility accorded by the arts and the sciences.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Aleksei German

Genre: Drama/Medieval Drama/Sci-Fi

Language: Russian

Country: Russia

Elena [2011]

Bristling and volatile familial dynamics, perhaps mirroring the sociopolitical landscape of modern day Russia, has been a crucial theme for Andrey Zvyagintsev’s dissenting voice – be it in the grim The Banishment or the brilliantly subversive Leviathan or the darkly compelling Loveless. In the bleak, restrained, engrossing and Hitchcockian Elena, the interplay between marital relationship and class differences made for an implosive Molotov Cocktail. The film begins with an eerily tranquil opening sequence that perfectly presaged the lull before the storm. Elena (Nadezhda Markina), a former nurse belonging to a lower social strata, is married to the fabulously wealthy Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov); though their’s might have been a love marriage, the yawning socioeconomic backgrounds of this middle-aged couple is firmly established by her role more as a housekeeper than an equal partner. And their delicate balance is made all the more fragile by their kids from previous marriages – she’s unhappy of the preferential treatment he extends to his strikingly attractive, hedonistic, acerbic daughter (Elena Lyadova), while he disdains her slob son (Aleksey Rozin) who resides in the working-class outskirts and is dependent on financial support, including to keep his teenage son out of compulsory military service. This precarious equilibrium, however, is given a nudge – which is enough for their house of cards to collapse – when, after a heart attack, he decides to bequeath his wealth to his daughter; and this, in turn, provokes her to take a grimly decisive step to get her rightful share. Shot using precisely controlled visuals, awash with brooding minimalism and punctuated with an evocative organ-based score, the film never took easy sides with any of the characters, which made its moral ambiguity all the more riveting.

Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Genre: Drama/Marital Drama/Family Drama
Language: Russian
Country: Russia