NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS PRESENT: SOVIET COLLAPSE CINEMA
Posters for: Cargo 200, Little Vera, Sisters, and Interdevochka.
The NEFARIOUS RUSSIANS would like to announce their SOVIET COLLAPSE CINEMA series. Four weekends this summer in Brooklyn, Evgenia and Yasha will be screening different Russian films from the late 1980s and 1990s — all of them set in a decaying or collapsed Soviet society and focused on the plight of young women trying to survive.
These are cult Russian films that have rarely been screened in American theaters.
These movies are not only a historic document. They are relevant to America today. America has entered its own age of decline — the signs are hard not to see. As people who have lived through the decline and collapse of the USSR, Evgenia and Yasha see a lot of parallels between what happened there and what is happening now in the US. You could say Russia’s past is from America’s future.
All films will be shown with English subtitles.
There will be a discussion and a Q&A after each screening moderated by a surprise celebrity guest.
Location: Film Noir Theater. 122 Meserole Ave, Brooklyn.
Tickets: $25.
Space is limited. Buy tickets in advance.
BANNED BY CANNES. A film about the grimness of Soviet decline. Based on real events. Set in the mid-1980s — a sadistic cop prowls the countryside and terrorizes a young woman, kids party, and a bloody Afghan War looms over everything. Directed by Aleksei Balabanov — famous for the cult films Brother and Brother II.
(Released in 2007. 89 minutes.)
Moderated by Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country.
About the life of a typical late Soviet girl. The most popular Soviet film of 1988, and one of the first Soviet films to have any nudity and sex. Directed by Vasili Pichul.
A little note: Natalya Negoda, the actress who played the leading role, was the first Soviet woman to pose naked in Playboy in 1989 to promote the film abroad. So Little Vera is not just a great film, it’s prophetic in a lot of ways. It foreshadowed something that was just around the corner for a lot of women in the USSR: a de facto market prostitutization of the female body on a scale never before experienced by the population.
(Released 1988. 128 minutes.)
A prostitute who caters to foreign men in the hotels of Leningrad in the 1980s moves to Sweden after marrying one of her clients — and realizes the West is not what she imagined. The most popular Soviet film of 1989.
Directed by Vladimir Kunin.
(Released in 1989. 151 minutes.)
Set in the lawlessness of the late 1990s, two young half-sisters have only themselves to rely on when they start being hunted by Russian mobsters. Directed by Sergei Bodrov Jr., the star of Brother and Brother II.
Soon after his debut, Bodrov was killed in an avalanche while shooting his second film.
(Released in 2001. 85 minutes.)
Moderated by Branko Milanovic, historian and former World Bank economist.
If you are from the press and would like to attend or write about the event, direct all inquiries to Stacy Schneider-Weiss: stacysw.pr@penguinmail.com.
Little Vera was definitely shown in the US, since I’ve seen ads for it in old newspapers in my job as an archivist. American reviews that I’ve seen praised the movie for its depictions of sex, while no doubt denouncing the same in our own films. I wish I could go, but I’m stuck in a certain Southern city for the foreseeable future, awaiting our own collapse.
Another absorbing film from this time is Assuage my sadness/ Утоли моя печали (1989). It's jarring because it includes a rape, but the old woman is a magnet for the free, unguided youths. I loved her genuine caring, and the other eccentric but kind, harmless fools. I will come to some of your screenings.