Dead Man’s Letters
Klassiki Picks with Ben Rivers: 7 August – 4 September
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1h 26m
Directed by Konstantin Lopushansky • 1986 • USSR/Russia
Arriving just months after the Chernobyl disaster, Konstantin Lopushansky’s post-apocalyptic prophecy is one of the final masterpieces of Soviet cinema. In a world devastated by nuclear war, a small community of survivors ekes out a life under the ruins of a museum. Among them is Nobel Laureate Professor Larsen (Rolan Bykov), who maintains his sanity while tending to his dying wife by writing endless letters to his missing son. In bleakly beautiful sequences that recall his apprenticeship under Tarkovsky, Lopushansky pits Larsen’s hope for salvation against humanity’s self-inflicted ruin. Co-written by Soviet sci-fi great Boris Strugatsky, Dead Man’s Letters is a haunting reflection of Cold War paranoia about the future of civilisation.
DEAD MAN’S LETTERS • ПИСЬМА МЕРТВОГО ЧЕЛОВЕКА
Directed by Konstantin Lopushansky
Written by Konstantin Lopushansky, Vyacheslav Rybakov, Boris Strugatsky
Cinematography by Nikolai Pokoptsev
Music by Aleksandr Zhurbin
Starring: Rolan Bykov, Vatslav Dvorzhetsky, Vera Mayorova
In Russian with English subtitles
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Days of Eclipse
Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov • 1988 • USSR/Turkmenistan
In the dying days of the Soviet experiment, a young doctor finds himself posted to a remote Turkmen town. Attempting to research the relationship between religious faith and medicine, he finds his efforts confounded by a series of mysterio...
