Beanpole
Historical drama about two women in the ruins of 1945 Leningrad struggling to rebuild their lives, loosely based on the work of Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich.
It’s 1945, and Leningrad lies in ruins, war-torn and paralyzed. Iya, a nurse, and Masha, a soldier, are traumatized from the siege and its aftermath, and struggling to rebuild their lives.
Drawing loosely from author and historian Svetlana Alexievich’s book THE UNWOMANLY FACE OF WAR (1985), Kantemir Balagov (TESNOTA) creates a world where women’s suffering and resilience becomes elliptic – with proactivity and punishment at either side of an ever-swinging pendulum. Spiritually bleak, yet rich in colour and remarkably precise in its style, the cinematic language of Balagov (a former student of Alexander Sokurov) speaks to a new generation of Russian filmmakers telling stories of a homeland that has yet to reconcile with its historical cataclysms.