Until the next ressurrection
Director Oleg Morozov
Countries
Duration 90 min
Synopsis
At the risk of falling into the trap of cheap romanticism, it would seem that certain works carry within themselves the seed of a strange destiny. This could well be the case of this film with its prophetic title. Shot in Russia, in Kaliningrad, the former German city then named Königsberg, emptied of its inhabitants after the 2nd World War and repopulated since by Russian migrants, the film follows, over a period of almost fifteen years, the track of certain characters whose fate, we are soon given to understand, is more or less sealed in advance. Moreover, a voice off tells us without mercy that they have passed away whereas all this while we see them on the screen moving around and struggling to survive. But it is not the irony of fate that predominates here or would maliciously seem to lead the film from insult to insult; rather a mad rage, a vital energy that brings this ghostly troop of poor wretches into the category of the great characters of Russian literature rather than to that of a questionable and sordid realism. It is an exceptional undertaking: on the one hand, nothing must be omitted in this descent into hell and then it must be followed through for years on end, not forgetting that this descent implies that there will be bodies who have made the choice (tragic or pathetic – it comes to the same) of giving themselves up entirely. The fact that Oleg Morozov, the film director who now and again appears on the screen, died on lst January 2009, some weeks after finishing the film, shows how his tribute to the future risen from the dead becomes his own testimony.
At the risk of falling into the trap of cheap romanticism, it would seem that certain works carry within themselves the seed of a strange destiny. This could well be the case of this film with its prophetic title. Shot in Russia, in Kaliningrad, the former German city then named Königsberg, emptied of its inhabitants after the 2nd World War and repopulated since by Russian migrants, the film follows, over a period of almost fifteen years, the track of certain characters whose fate, we are soon given to understand, is more or less sealed in advance. Moreover, a voice off tells us without mercy that they have passed away whereas all this while we see them on the screen moving around and struggling to survive. But it is not the irony of fate that predominates here or would maliciously seem to lead the film from insult to insult; rather a mad rage, a vital energy that brings this ghostly troop of poor wretches into the category of the great characters of Russian literature rather than to that of a questionable and sordid realism. It is an exceptional undertaking: on the one hand, nothing must be omitted in this descent into hell and then it must be followed through for years on end, not forgetting that this descent implies that there will be bodies who have made the choice (tragic or pathetic – it comes to the same) of giving themselves up entirely. The fact that Oleg Morozov, the film director who now and again appears on the screen, died on lst January 2009, some weeks after finishing the film, shows how his tribute to the future risen from the dead becomes his own testimony.