Based on the works of the Georgian poet Vazha-Pshavela, this influential classic follows a Christian soldier in the Caucasus at the turn of the twentieth century. When he refuses to cut off his enemy’s hand, he is ostracised by his fellow villagers and sent into exile. Wandering through the wilderness in what seems like a dream, he arrives in a Muslim village, where he is sent to the top of a mountain to freeze to death.
Tag: USSR
The film takes place in the XIX century. In a rich house come to the New Year’s tree children from rich families. A servant girl, similar to Cosette from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, observes their holiday. After the holiday, during the cleaning of the hall, she dances with a broom instead of a partner and sees an abandoned nutcracker – a toy that was cracked with nuts and almost broke. She awakens a pity for the Nutcracker, and he comes to life and tells the main character about his past.
In this extremely funny satire on Soviet bureaucracy, the protagonist, a hapless author, attempts again and again to get his editors to accept his manuscript — a novel with the title “Blue Mountains or Tieshan.” The story unfolds with the inevitability of a fairy tale in which a naive hero is painfully being initiated into the ways of the world, and while the would-be author wanders through the hallways of his publishers, we in turn learn a lot about the crumbling Soviet system and the inactivity of its bureaucratic functionaries. By Hollywood standards, the film may be slow and repetitive, but it is precisely the repetition of tragicomic situations that bring the film to the heights of a Beckettian absurdity.
A soldier in a Soviet nuclear facility finds himself trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare with no exit in sight. The surreal imagery in this cartoon from Armenfilm includes a platoon of miniature shock troopers, mutant generals and dinosaurs singing We Are the World. The sense that communism had failed to advance, and was in fact causing the Soviet Union to turn in on itself, is powerfully felt.
A railway controller and his sweetheart live in peace next to the railway tracks. Out of nowhere, an umbrella flies into their life. They try to catch it, and finally do manage to grasp it for a short moment, but it slips away and then disappears.
Mother Mouse is singing to her baby. The can’t get him to sleep. A succession of other animals comes to try to help, and they all get increasingly frustrated until eventually they ask the cat. The cat seems helpful but may have other plans for the little mouse…
Two cosmonauts arrive on a barren world and begin a clean-up operation. In the course of their duties, they revive the planet’s civilisation and discover the real reason for its devastation- thermonuclear war. Produced after the peak of tensions in the late Cold War, this animated short from Armenfilm reflects a muted optimism that humanity might- just- avoid total destruction. It also demonstrates the strength of animation under the Soviet system, where even the smaller state studios were capable of inventive but technically polished work.
A requiem for a Russian peasant woman, Maria Semionovna Voinova. The film is in two chapters. The first chapter consists of an impression of Maria Semionovna, scenes of the colours of summer time: hay–making, bathing in a river, work in the flax fields and a holiday in the Crimea. The second chapter, set nine years later, is in black and white and deals with how Maria Semionovna’s life ended. The mood is one of a sad and elegiac narration.