Dear Comrades!

Winner of major awards at Venice and Chicago film festivals 2020., and one of top 5 picked by the National Board of Review, USA, it is a remarkable screenplay written by the director and his co-scriptwriter Kiseleva (they have collaborated on 4 feature films, 3 of which I have seen) with the director's wife Yulia Vysostskaya playing the main role. Their works are slow paced but gather steam only as you reach the thought-provoking and stunning ends in each film. The one film that eluded me thus far of the 4 films is "Sin" (2019), a biopic on sculptor/painter Michelangelo, a copy of which was presented to the Pope by Putin. And the Pope is apparently an admirer of the director. One damning aside in the script is that Nobel Prize winner Mikhail Sholokov's "And Quiet Flows the Don" did not present the full truth of the events in the novel as one would have assumed it did. The award winning "Paradise" and "The Postman's White Nights" are the other wonderful works from the team. Reminds one of the late collaborations on the films of director Ken Loach with writer Paul Laverty, David Lean with writer Robert Bolt, and of Kieslowski with writer Piesiewicz in the evening of the respective director's careers.