on the road again…

This is the second instalment of a three-part series of autobiographical films about the director’s life.

The first, which won various awards for its maker, was entitled Zamri Oumi Voskresni and was later retitled Zari, Umri, Vokresni (“Freeze-Die-Come to Life).

At the end of that film, set at the conclusion of World War II, the young Valerka was striving hard to overcome the inertia of just getting by, along with his sometime friend Galiya. In this one, he is adjusting to Galiya’s death and is back in school and is living with his mother, a prostitute. After a girl at the school is found to have been gang-raped, the headmaster chooses Valerka to be one of the scapegoats, though he had nothing to do with the deed.

The punishment seems mild enough, he was simply expelled from school. However, after quarrelling with his mother about the incident, he takes to the road, and discovers a society so bleak, degraded and hopeless that it is a wonder he remained alive.

http://nitroflare.com/view/F0F4C8B6757148C/Samostoyatelnaya_zhizn_aka_An_Independent_Life.mkv

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:French (hardcoded)

The post Vitali Kanevsky – Samostoyatelnaya zhizn aka An Independent Life (1992) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
“Freeze-Die-Come to Life,” a first film by Vitaly Kanevski, offers a stark look at growing up in the frozen wastes of the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. A largely autobiographical work, it is the sweetly grim story of a couple of street-smart kids in the mining town of Suchan. A Russian variation on India’s “Salaam Bombay,” the film both celebrates and buries youthful innocence.

An engaging pair of nonprofessionals, Pavel Nazarov and Dinara Drukarova, are Valerka and Galiya, playmates who manage a semblance of childhood despite their sorry circumstances. And they don’t make circumstances any sorrier than in Suchan, with its towering ash heaps and streets oozing raw sewage. Ragged and hungry, Valerka and Galiya sell hot tea, a ruble a cup, to the downcast miners, the one-legged veterans and the nickel-a-night whores.

Valerka’s mother is a prostitute and bartender who locks him out when she has a visitor and reports him to the school administrators when he plays a prank. Galiya, slightly older and wiser as little girls are wont to be, is continually getting the handsome Valerka out of scrapes. And the two of them demonstrate a capacity for playfulness that is all the more remarkable for the ugliness all around them.

Like last week’s Polish film “The Interrogation,” Kanevski’s picture concerns the Stalin era, a period of brutality and deprivation that currently obsesses Eastern-bloc audiences and filmmakers. Though he had unofficial official permission to shoot the film, he did so undercover and on a shoestring in the Soviet Orient. Kanevski was also obliged to edit under duress, which may account for the jagged and puzzling last half of the starkly lyrical film.

“Freeze-Die-Come to Life” won the 1990 Cannes Film Festival’s prize for Best First Film, less for artistic merit perhaps than for political considerations.

http://nitroflare.com/view/FD8C36E7375AED2/Vitali_Kanevski_-_%281990%29_Freeze%2C_Die%2C_Come_to_Life%21.mkv

Language(s):Russian
Subtitles:English

The post Vitali Kanevsky – Zamri, umri, voskresni! AKA Freeze Die Come to Life (1990) first appeared on Cinema of the World.