HEY, YOU WILD GEESE


Title   Cast   Director   Year Shown  Other Info    Country  Notes 


Oy vy, gousi

Russia, 1991, 88 min

Shown in 1992

CREDITS

dir
Lydia Bobrova
prod
Valentina Tarasova
cam
Sergei Astakhov
editor
Z. Shopokhova
cast
Vyacheslav Sobolev, Yuri Frolov, Galina Volkova

OTHER

source
Lenfilm Studios

COMMENTS

Lydia Bobrova in person.

Lydia Bobrova's directorial debut is one of great emotional depth, sensitivity and unexpected deadpan humor. It tells of three brothers in an impoverished village: Mitka, an invalid unable to work because of his health; and his wife Raya, an overworked seamstress with a bad heart; his brother Petka, a scrawny runt married to the monumental Dasha, a nurse in an old age home. Sanya, the third brother, returns after eleven years in prison—whether for murder or for a political offense is not clear. The action takes place during the 1980 Moscow Olympics, an event whose kitschy splendor reaches the villagers through newsreel and television, overlaid by patriotic hymns to the great Soviet Motherland, all of which only serve to underline the hopeless dullness of their own lives. For ten years, censorship made production of Hey, You Wild Geese impossible. When political conditions changed, Bobrova could not bring herself to entrust her script to some other director so she entered film school and studied direction—with Alexei Gherman, among others—so she could make the film herself. The film speaks not only of Bobrova's own experiences and those of her family but of countless others who live in Russia's remote provinces. It may be seen as an allegorical fable about that vast country and its recent history.