Kinopoezd: Russkaya Zima
Cristina Picchi, Tristan Daws, Dieter Deswarte, Benny Jaberg, Sandhya Daisy Sundaram & Bernadett Tuza-Ritter
Russia | 2013 | 89 min
Languages : Russian, English
Subtitles : English, French
In January 2013, twenty filmmakers gathered in Moscow before departing on a 10,000-kilometre train journey to meet Russians and understand how they view themselves. The result is a choral work that pays tribute to Aleksandr Medvedkin’s 1932 experimental odyssey across the Soviet Union aboard his ‘cinétrain’ to film the working people of the towns and countryside.
She had dreamed of being a dancer, but worked as a crane operator during the Communist era and, for twenty years, Ludmilla has now been taking a train journey four times a month from Moscow to Tomsk return (almost 3,000 km), working as a cleaning lady, always moving between two points in the immense space of Russia. Also departing from the capital are twenty filmmakers, likewise using the railway to travel some 10,000 km in a month, to meet a few representatives of the Russian people and understand how they view themselves: redacted according to a few themes selected in the editing (winter, women, vodka, bears, the Russian soul...), Cinétrain: Russian Winter is thus a choral film that pays tribute to the experiment conducted by Aleksandr Medvedkin who travelled across the Soviet Union in 1932 aboard his "Cinétrain" to film the working people of the towns and countryside. It was the eschatological era of triumphant socialism, and the purpose of cinema was to reveal a people in transformation. But the dream has vanished, perhaps carried away by one of those snowstorms that mark the Russian winter, which serves as a frame inspiring this cinematographic quest filmed on a human scale.
Emmanuel Chicon
guillaume@cinetrain.net
guillaume@cinetrain.net+79263701773
+79263701773