The first part of the duology From Barrack to Paris focuses on Valentina Kropivnitskaya, the daughter of poet, artist, and the head of Lianozovo group Yevgeny Kropivnitsky. Their house, not far from the Lianozovo train station, became a centre of artistic life, uniting avant-garde, nonconformist, and underground artists and poets in the late 1950s.
The mentioned definitions were not mere styles of their art but covered their entire lifestyle: the barrack became a synonym of the underground, while the search for freedom and a new artistic language in the country, where socialist realism was official art, often led to tragic outcomes. The best possible scenario, which the heroes had to follow, was forced immigration. Curiously, the movie, released on Rabin's ninetieth birthday, is a classic biographical film by genre, but its content precisely mimics the main topics of Rabin’s oeuvre: it is a history of freedom, love, and human dignity.
Oscar
Directors: Evgeniy Tsymbal, Alexander Smoljanski
Russia-Germany-France, 2018, 90 min. 16+
