Another View 2015 / Pionery-geroi / Russia 2015
In childhood they lived by performing heroic acts. Today they are successful 30-year-olds beset by ennui who no longer find satisfaction from high-paying jobs or from amassing possessions. A penetrating, comprehensive, and humorous analysis of the futility experienced by the last generation of Soviet pioneers. The writer-director debut (of one of their peers) struck a responsive chord at this year’s Berlinale.
Katya, Olga and Andrey are former classmates who grew up in an adventure-filled world in which they exposed spies, performed heroic deeds, awaited a brighter future, and dreamed of becoming a pioneer. Today they are successful, with prestigious jobs, expensive cars and large flats, but they lack a sense of fulfilment in their lives. Their childhood visions of being predestined for lofty goals seem to have evaporated with the end of the Soviet era. In a consumer society which yearns for stability, those dreams now seem at once naïve, tempting and paralyzing. Natalya Kudryashova’s semi-autobiographical debut presents an incisive account of the acute sense of futility felt by today’s generation of (not only Russian) thirty-somethings. The schizophrenia felt by people, whose entire country and meaning of life were abruptly transformed at the start of their adolescence, is expertly portrayed through the fluid shift between two timelines, offering a witty commentary on the era of Soviet propaganda and on today’s world of superfluous requirements.
Kamila Dolotina
115 min / Color, DCP
Director Natalya Kudryashova
/ Screenplay Natalya Kudryashova
/ Dir. of Photography Ruslan Gerasimenkov
/ Editor Semyon Galperin
/ Art Director Asya Davidova
/ Producer Sergey Selyanov
/ Production CTB Film Company
/ Coproduction „Seance“ Magazine
/ Cast Natalya Kudryashova, Daria Moroz, Aleksei Mitin
/ Sales Alpha Violet
Natalya Kudryashova (b. 1978, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia) studied acting, first in her hometown and then in Moscow, where she performed at the theatre of her teacher Anatoly Vasiliev. Despite having a successful acting career, which included several prestigious domestic awards, she decided to work in film and studied scriptwriting and directing, earning a degree in 2012. Her debut film Pioneer Heroes (2015), in which she also appears as one of the main characters, represents a long-anticipated cinematic attempt to portray the current generation of Russian thirty-somethings, of which the director is a member as well.
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