LITTLE PEOPLE, BIG HISTORY

There was a propaganda formula in the USSR which stated that “The destiny of a man is the destiny of the people”. As a rule they “marked” official film works, which introduced to the popular masses the party line. I remember we secretly ridiculed the words, all the more so because the “wide audience” was not very enthusiastic about that sort of film produced.

And we were wrong.

Let’s put aside the rightly forgotten government-ordered works. And let’s recall other films. “The Outskirts” and “The Grapes of Wrath”, “Rome, Open City” and “Ballad of a Soldier”, “Ilyich’s Outpost” and “Man of Marble” – all of them and many other masterpieces of world cinema describe how at crucial moments in history the destiny of the people is reflected in the destiny of the protagonist.

To be sure the movies in the program are not masterpieces. The time of great cinema is sadly over. But they are rather interesting from the artistic, political and, after all, educational point of view. When we follow the lives of people, masterfully captured by the filmmakers, we mentally go back to the first Christian years, to the First World War or the Peron dictatorship in Argentina…

Sergey Lavrentiev