Barak
Russia,
1999, 110 min
Shown in 2000
CREDITS
- dir
-
Valery Ogorodnikov
- prod
-
Stanislav Archipov, Leonid Yarmolnik
- scr
-
Valery Ogorodnikov, Victor Petrov
- cam
-
Yuri Klimenko
- editor
-
Galina Tanayeva
- cast
-
Irina Senotova, Julia Svezhakova, Yevgeny Sidikhin, Natalya Igarova, Nina Usatova, Leonid Yarmolnik
- source
-
Dar Film Co., 10, Kamennoostrovsky , 197101 St. Petersburg, Russia. FAX: 7 812 326 8370
- premiere
-
North American Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Valery Ogorodnikov in person.
OTHER
A small but remarkably cosmopolitan village somewhere in the Urals, between war-ravaged Leningrad and the gulags of Siberia, is the setting of this whirlwind, tragicomic portrayal of Russian provincial life during the summer of 1953, just after Stalin’s death. Home to countless war refugees and ex–political prisoners, the town’s communal living barracks boast a mix of Germans, Russians, Tartars and Jews. All of them welcome Olga, the sole survivor of a family wiped out during the siege of Leningrad. Inhabited by tough German soldiers, drunken dove breeders, ex–Nazi collaborators, mute Tartars and even a one-legged photographer-clown, Olga’s new community is at once tender, serious and zany, possessing its own joys and sorrows, romantic interludes and moments of tension. Marked by history while somehow living outside its borders, the barracks dwellers forge an identity neither Russian, German or Jewish, but rather its own, as all of them attempt to forget an oppressive past and to live again with relative nonchalance. With wild characterizations as wide-ranging and unforgettable as its photography, which loops from black and white to sepia tone to faux-faded Sovcolor, Barracks forges a warm portrait of community, and of vitality improbably born out of death.
FACTOID #109
Though the film had won two major awards at the Berlin Film Festival, John Cassavetes’ Love Streams was pulled from the SFIFF program at the last minute by the distributor. According to Cassavetes, MGM/UA was concerned that showing Streams, which the director himself proclaimed ’a crazy film,’ at the SFIFF might hurt the film’s box office upon wider release
