Too much for one cinema, the Russian Resurrection Film Festival has seconded the Event Cinemas, Burwood to its original showcase, the Chauvel in Paddington, to present a pageant of contemporary Ruski film making.

From blistering drama, to sizzling history to delightful comedies, the festival, now in its ninth year, offers an extravaganza of rousing Russian entertainment.

The festival’s opening night film is SPY (M) the self evidently titled picture about espionage and Soviet intelligence’s efforts to discover the Nazi’s true intentions towards Mother Russia.

Aleksei Andrianov’s debut feature feels like an old Saturday matinee serial with better production values as our hero, a dashing young soldier with delusions of the debonair and a predilection for the debacle, deals with death, deceit and duplicity under the guidance of seasoned spion spoon feeder, Fedor Bonderchuk.

The ubiquitous Fedor, son of celebrated Soviet cineaste, Sergei Bonderchuk, pops up in the delightfully daffy but bitingly delightful comedy, TWO DAYS.

Here he plays a Politburo hard head sent to a rural museum to dictate cultural policy. There he meets an equally hard headed woman, passionate about the museum and local and national culture and not just for political expediency.

The dramatic, comedic and romantic soil tilled here is alluvial with Shakespearian richness, with more than a tincture of the Taming of the Shrew and a measure of Much Ado About Nothing. Gender politics is as much to the fore as party or government policy which makes for vigorous and robust jousting all set against a backdrop of rural idyll.

With its summery situation and denizens putting on shows of re-enactments for the powers that be, one can hardly dislodge another Shakespearian allusion to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

SIBERIA MONAMOUR (M) sounds like a love letter but this ironically titled film is a severe triptych of backwater life in a Russia seemingly unchained since pre Soviet days.

Ostensibly about the struggles of a grandfather and his grandson in the savage snowbound ice age of Siberian wilderness, a wilderness where superstition outstrips any notion of statehood, and where any semblance of civilisation succumbs to the primitive.

At the center of the story is a young orphan, Lyochka, and his grandfather, who is played by Pyotry Zaichenko. The two live in the otherwise abandoned old village, in the kind of disrepair that is one step from destitution. Their only protection is an ancient icon they pray to each night by candlelight. These icons are beacons for robbers who trawl the taiga looking for treasure to steal. A troubled Army officer and his grunt soldier abuse but then ultimately find a surprising solidarity with a teenage girl and their path eventually leads them to Lyochka, who has landed in a most perilous predicament.

EXPIATION (M) is an exploration of the exploitation of the state against the family, the subversive suspicion sown in Soviet society which spawned paranoia before Perestroika put paid to its corrosive effects.

In a moment of pique, a young girl places her mother, their tenants, and her mother’s lover in a perilous political pickle, the consequences of which play mercilessly on her conscience.

Cause, consequence and conscience are the cornerstones of this drama, which dour and dire subject matter is leavened with an act of contrition and the gift of forgiveness.

Had HOME(MA) been a Hollywood film you would probably think that Quentin Tarantino had a hand in it.

Congregating to celebrate the centennial birthday of the family patriarch, a family’s skeletons come out of the linen closet to air their dirty laundry.

Dirtiest of all is the prodigal son who returns from the big smoke trailing a hit squad of goons. As familial tensions flair among the reunion of self-servers and unsociable reptilians, the homicidal posse closes in on their quarry, cuing a denouement of carnage.
This is domestic drama with gangster sub-genre at its best, gorgeously shot, powerfully played, and with a string of surprises that keeps this thriller enthralling.

THE WHITE TIGER (M) is a WWII combat film about a legendary Nazi tank that wreaked havoc on Soviet armoured divisions.
Miraculously surviving an incineration after his tank is destroyed, Ivan makes a marvelous recovery and is imbued with a seemingly supernatural symbiosis with mobile artillery. He literally becomes a think tank able to sense turret and tread tactics from a phantom Panzer dubbed the White Tiger which has decimated Soviet tank divisions.

With hints of The English Patient and catch 22, THE WHITE TIGER is a breathtakingly beautiful film about the brutality and futility of war, a meditation on the myth-making power of conflict, and an honest exploration of whether war is man’s natural state.

Musings range from a Darwinian argument that man will evolve into more sophisticated killing machines as they merge with the technology of weapons and that the Nazi’s were only doing what all of Europe was thinking – that both Russia and the Jews were inferior, a blot on the Continental landscape, and required remedy.

The battle scenes are predominantly real, that is without the use of computer graphics, brilliantly staged and strategically placed in the body of the narrative.

Reminiscent of romantic screwball comedies of the 40’s, FIVE BRIDES is a madcap matrimonial mayhem set at the end of WWII, where a dashing aviation ace must again display his courage by masquerading as four of his comrades in a quest of conjugal contract.

This deception is due to the denial of these men’s demobbing and their fear that all the fertile females they’ve fought a war for will be forfeit. Their future forsaken, desperate measures must be undertaken, and the flyer granted furlough is charged with wedding a quartet and bringing them back to quarters.

The good natured and good looking emissary (Lesha) is fortunate to fall in with a feisty female postal worker, Zoya. (Think about it – a female mailman- a nod and a wink to the tone of the fun feminist farce this film is). Au fait and ok with his fraudulent yet fervent mission to marry multiple women, Zoya becomes his accomplice, partly out of fondness for this faithful friend and partly for her disdain for the bureaucracy that has put this farce into play.

Indeed, local bureaucrats in the film are portrayed as buffoons, albeit led and abetted by a woman, with authority thwarted by frank feminine wiles.

A frothier fantasy is MY GUY IS AN ANGEL, a rom com riff on Wings of Desire where a contemporary Russian woman is visited by a charming Malachim sent presumably to settle her for romantic and domestic bliss.

A soufflé light comedy, the film still manages to echo a theme that runs through much of the festival’s fare – that of the old USSR (or CCCP) rubbing up against the new Russia, and the resurrection of religion and supernatural in society.

For the kids there is the animated feature Ivan Tsarevich and the Grey Wolf and the Transformers inspired AUGUST 8.
The Festival marks the bicentenary of the 1812 defeat of Napoleon with screenings of 1812, a hundred year old silent classic, and Sergey Bondarchuk’s epic Academy award winning WAR & PEACE.

Special events during the festival include a series of Q&A sessions with a host of visiting international actors and directors.
Alexey Andrianov Director of the Opening Night espionage thriller Spy will be in Sydney to introduce his film, plus do a Q&A at subsequent Sydney sessions.

Producer Dmitriy Pirkulov will present discussions on the making of his new film Expiation, which masterfully recreates the post-war Totalitarian Soviet State. A must see for all history-buffs, the film is yet to be released in Russia!

Also visiting Australia is Darya Ekamasova winner of the Best Actress NIKA Award for her role in the confronting and moving art-house drama There Once Lived a Simple Woman. Darya will be in Sydney on Friday 31 August to do a Q&A following the 6.30pm screening.

With just two weeks to go, tickets to all sessions are available for purchase.

In its ninth year the 2012 Russian Resurrection Film Festival promises to showcase the best of new and old Russian Cinema to Australian audiences. Over 44,000 people have embraced the festival in past years, and the highly anticipated line-up for 2012 looks set to impress. The Festival takes place between August 30 and September 12, 2012.

For more information visit the official website at www.russianresurrection.com.

© Richard Cotter

25th August, 2012

Tags: THE RUSSIAN RESURECTION FILM FESTIVAL 2012, Sydney Arts Guide.