nwFilmCenter

Russia

Mon, Feb 12, 2007
at 6:30 PM

Fri, Feb 16, 2007
at 9 PM

The Italian

DIRECTOR: ANDREI KRAVCHUK
RUSSIA
Writer Andrei Romanov and director Andrei Kravchuk constructed this ingenious, tragicomic tale of a desolate, decaying orphanage in the Russian countryside that sells abandoned kids to prosperous Western Europeans. The adults running the operation live in a haze of greed and alcoholic self–pity; the fatalistic elder orphans are thugs and hookers who accept crime and brutality as their only option in life. In this Dickensian world, nine–year–old Vanya is adopted by an Italian family. With a loving family and freedom in a new country on the horizon he is the envy of his fellow orphans. Yet rather than accept this new life, Vanya flees in search of his birth–mother and the truth of his past. A dual–award winner at the Berlin Film Festival and the 2005 Russian submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, The Italian is an elegant and poignant allegory for the moral crisis of Russia's new post–communist generation. ( 99 min )

Filmography: Christmas Mystery (00).
Sponsored by Alaska Airlines.
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Sat, Feb 17, 2007
at 8 PM

Sun, Feb 18, 2007
at 7:15 PM

Free Floating

DIRECTOR: BORIS KHLEBNIKOV
RUSSIA
Khlebnikov's "humor of the everyday" asks us to look again at the world about us. Lyonya's work at the local factory and his hoped–for career disappears when the plant is taken over by 'the Americans' and closed down. He becomes a regular visitor to the employment office and attempts a variety of dead end jobs—shoe seller in a market, plasterer, road crew. He eventually meets a woman he went to school with and after a bad start, gets things on the right track. Set in a small town on the Volga, where enthusiasm for anything seems somewhat relaxed, hardly anything actually happens, but through Khlebnikov's quirky, absurdist observation—a picture of Chuck Norris on a workbench, trying on shoes, a woman peeling a boiled egg, the creaking door of the employment office—we come to know the floating life. ( 101 min )

Filmography: Roads to Koktebel (03).
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