A Tour of the "New East" in Film

“We’re now living in a new world,” declared Mikhail Gorbachev when he stepped down as leader of the Soviet Union. The repercussions of the fall of the USSR had a monumental impact on its sense of collective identity. Ever since, cinema has aimed to capture the cultural metamorphoses of these newly autonomous regions, mirroring the changing notions of self and the anxieties of the former Soviet Union as it experienced one of the largest political transformations of the 20th century. This brief tour into the films of the “New East” traces how shifting cultural identity, generational disparity and the reclamation of national memories have shaped its cinematic landscape.

1. Tuesday, After Christmas? (2010)
Director: Radu Muntea
Country: Romania?

The seeds of what would be branded the “Romanian New Wave” began to bear fruit in 2004 when Catalin Mitulescu’s Traffic won the award for best short film at the Cannes Film Festival. However, it wasn’t until Cristi Puiu’s gritty expose of Romania’s communist-era health system, The Death of Mr Lazarescu won the Un Certain Regard that critics began to wonder if cinema’s next big movement could be bubbling away on the western bank of the Black Sea. However, behind all this fanfare Radu Muntea’s disarmingly simple, yet emotionally demanding drama Tuesday, After Christmas somehow managed to slip through the net. Effortlessly echoing the subtle rhythms of life, this tale of a crumbling marriage observed over a few days in the Yuletide season laudably depicts each character with unreserved empathy. By eschewing the melodrama of similar relationship dramas and using intense long takes to focus on the minute movements of a marriage, Muntea successfully zones in on the less glamorous moments of life’s great symphony and, in doing so, successfully captures the melancholic cadence of urban life in modern Romania.

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2. Werckmeister Harmonies (2001)
Director: Béla Tarr, Agnes Hranitzky
Country: Hungary

For Bela Tarr’s third collaboration with novelist László Krasznahorkai, he observes the effects of a mysterious foreign force on the collective will of a provincial town. We follow Janos Verluska (Lars Rudolph), a philosophical young man searching for meaning within a stifling atmosphere of despair. One day a circus arrives, its collection of oddities including the carcass of a large whale and a mysterious man known only as “The Prince.” This enigmatic stranger comes with a following of disenfranchised immigrants from neighboring towns, their arrival stoking the embers of disharmony amongst this fragile populous. A naturalistic and elegant horror film about the cycles of violence that have continually plague Eastern European, this is Tarr’s most haunting work. The Slovak-speaking Prince can be read as a metaphor for Stalin and his oppressive communist regime, whilst the pious manner in which Tarr frames the whale carcass points towards the eroding influence of religion. Yet despite his agnostic message, Tarr’s style is so transcendent it’s difficult to argue the lack of a heavenly force.

3. Elena (2011)
Director: Andrei Zvyagintsev
Country: Russia

Whilst Andrei Zvyagintsev is best known for his Golden Lion-winning debut The Return, and the recently Academy Award-nominated Leviathan, it’s easy to forget that between the two he created a modest masterpiece. Zvyaginstev’s third feature acts to illuminate the gulfing class divide in contemporary Russia whilst highlighting the generation disparity between post-glasnost children and the pre-glasnost parents. Elena (Nadezhda Markina) and Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) are an elderly couple who come from very different backgrounds; Vladimir is wealthy but emotionally numb, whilst Elena comes from a modest upbringing and believes in the importance of family. The pair met late in life and both have children from previous marriages. Vladimir’s daughter is a self-confessed hedonist whilst Elena’s son is unemployed and constantly pestering her for money. When a sudden heart attack lands Vladimir in the hospital, his decision over how his inheritance will be split forces Elena to make a drastic and unalterable decision. Elena is an intelligent and nuanced insight into shifting familial dynamics, with Zvyaginstev’s languid, yet meticulously calibrated pace heightening the fragile bonds that bind his characters, whilst constantly alluding to the economic forces that strive to tear them apart.

4. Maïdan (2011)
Director: Sergei Loznitsa
Country: Ukraine

Belarusian born, but Ukranian raised director Sergei Loznitsa turned Kiev’s Independence Square into the canvas for his return to documentary filmmaking. Plunging the audience into the midst of the recent Euromaidan wave of civil unrest, Loznitsa maintains a passive distance throughout, allowing the collective disquiet of the crowd to become the catalyst behind the film’s unspoken march forward. Purely observational, this immersive experience builds an atmosphere of immediacy and, whilst the camera only moves twice throughout the whole film, both instances resonate with great socio-political significance. Bonfire smoke and tear gas intermingle to create a sense of time and place as this melting pot of nationalism, social inequality and collectivism boils over. Maïdan is a pure as documentary filmmaking can be and, in an age of 24-hour news reporting, is a welcome account of a global event that highlights Eastern Europe’s perpetual state of insecurity.

5. Klass (2007)
Director: Ilmar Raag
Country: Estonia

Many feared the ills of the West would contaminate the fabric of society following the fall of the USSR, yet no one thought it would happen as quickly as it did. The political, economic and social challenges that followed were monumental. Some countries became wealthy, whilst others were mired in poverty, yet most embraced capitalism with open arms. The classroom setting of Estonian drama Klass could be transferred to any Western town or city, so familiar is its depiction of mob mentality and the irrational fear of outsiders. Combining a dynamic, high-tempo editing style with a journalistic eye, Klass investigates the mechanisms of bullying and the psychological damage it can foster. The focus of the classroom’s animosity is 16-year-old Joosep (Part Uusberg) and, just like in Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, Joosep’s actions echo the tragic events of Columbine. However, unlike Van Sant, Raag posits a rationale for the violence, namely the conformity and indiscernible shackles of depression and anger a consumerist society can nurture.

6. Vodka Lemon (2003)
Director: Hiner Saleem
Country: Armenia

In an isolated rural village in post-Soviet Armenia, Hamo travels daily to visit his wife’s grave. Here he meets Nina, a local barmaid visiting the gravestone of her recently departed husband. They’re penniless yet discover a welcome respite from their miserable lives in each other’s company. Having endured decades of oppressive Soviet control and a horrifying genocide, you’d expect a far bleaker film to emanate from Armenia. However, whilst Vodka Lemon obscures its mordant thematic skeleton with a whitewash of snowcapped realism, this is a delightfully lighthearted excursion to the mountainous environs of the South Caucasus. A sprinkling of wry, yet astringent comedy suggests the paradox faced by this impoverished village as it attempts to survive without the Soviet support system. In one scene, two elderly gentlemen sit on the roadside and discuss their country’s Soviet past: “They pretended to do everything for us, and we pretended to do everything for them.” His colleague suggests things are no better now, “Now we have to pay for gas, electricity, water—we have nothing left but our freedom.”

7. The Corridor (1995)
Director: Sharunas Bartas
Country: Lithuania

On the 11th March, 1990, a year before the formal break-up of the Soviet Union, Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare itself independent. Sharunas Bartas’ monochrome essay-film about life in a claustrophobic apartment block is a profoundly moving portrait of this tentative period of Lithuanian history. Bartas doesn’t provide any kind of expository insight into the motives of his characters, with the film articulated solely through violent motifs and the vacant stare of the building’s voiceless inhabitants, yet there remains a flickering and unspoken hope behind the film’s opaque veneer. Managing to create a political film without making explicit references to politics, Bartas’ fragmented narrative occupies the space between dreams and memory, succinctly symbolizing the links between Lithuania’s past, present and uncertain future.

8. Wrony (1994)
Director: Dorota Kedzierzawska
Country: Poland

Inhabiting the realm of childhood, where society’s moral boundaries are still to be defined and dreams permeate the fibrous fabric of reality, Kedzierzawska’s Wrony takes a disturbing tale of child kidnapping and swaddles it within the innocent subjectivity of adolescence. This poignant Polish drama follows a gaunt, yet precocious girl as she wanders about the gothic architecture of her home town of Toru?, one of Poland’s oldest cities. Known only as Crow, she grows tired of her mother’s negligence and kidnaps a neighboring toddler, insisting the child call her “mummy.” As Crow wanders the medieval boulevards and riverbanks of Toru? (beautifully captured by cinematographer Artur Reinhart) the multitude of empty spaces and complete lack of adult intrusion emphasize the widening generation gap in Poland at the time. This is no more evident than in the film’s heartbreaking final shot of Crow pleading to be noticed by her mother—a despairing conclusion to a film about love and the need to be loved that adeptly captures the state of a nation.

9. In Bloom (2013)
Directors: Simon Groß, Nana Ekvtimishvili
Country: Georgia

In Bloom tells the story of fourteen-year-old Eka (Lika Babluani) as she grows up in Georgia in the early 1990s. Her father is in prison for murder, but she still clings to the Soviet cigarettes and passport he left behind. The potential for civil war is never explicitly expressed, yet between anxious queues for bread and the reports over the wireless of discord in the neighboring Black Sea state of Abkhazia, the threat of violence constantly permeates her life. A captivating portrait of urban dissonance, class inequality and burgeoning factions of nationalism told against the tale of a teenage girl growing up in post-Soviet Union Georgia, In Bloom eschews the traditional clichés of the coming-of-age genre to poetically depict the confused identity of a country in a state of transition.

10. Silent Souls (2010)
Director: Aleksei Fedorchenko
Country: Russia

It feels imprudent to end a filmic tour of Eastern Europe and not cast an eye over at least one of the numerous indigenous peoples of Russia. Aleksei Fedorchenko’s Silent Souls offers a perplexing insight into the myths and rituals of the Merya, a western branch of the Mari people, a Finno-Ugric ethnic group who inhabit a territory known in Russia as the Golden Ring. The film follows Miron, a recently widowed Merja who asks his best friend Aist to assist him in bidding farewell to his wife according to the rituals of their culture. Their road trip to Lake Nero, a picturesque area of Yaroslavl Oblast, allows Miron to luxuriate in the memories of his deceased wife, yet in the process he begins to realize he might not have been the only one to have loved her. Fedorchenko’s deployment of folk traditions allows him to create something truly unique, combining a melancholic sense of magical realism with moments of faint whimsy that transform this somber meditation on the nature of love and loss into an enthralling and poetically laconic paean to the shifting winds of time and the gentle erosion of tradition.

A Tour of the “New East” in Film

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