(ANSA) - VENICE, 07 SEPT - "Today the happy ending is a miracle", this is how Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky comments on the ending of his 'Dear comrades!'
presented in Competition at the 77th Venice International Film Festival.
For its part, this is the only sentence that recalls the present after having avoided with great style questions about contemporary Russia with its many recent mysteries.
In this film, only a piece of history from the 1960s prevails, in the Khrushchev era, which he tells in a beautiful black and white, also in homage to his parents.
We are in Novocherkassk in 1962. Lyudmila, (Julia Vysotsakaya, wife of the director) a member of the local Communist Party, is animated by the greatest faith in the party and its ideals.
Now, during a workers' demonstration in a automotive factory, a shooting breaks out on demonstrators ordered by the government and perpetrated by the KGB to suppress the strike.
An extraordinary fact that will change the history of the country that had never seen a repression with the use of weapons against fellow workers.
Lyudmila's daughter is among the many missing.
From here, on the part of the woman, the frantic search in a blocked city and with the authorities who want to cover up everything.
In the film, with classic tones and full of the charm of a Soviet Union in economic crisis, but still strong in the rootedness of its values in every social class, a lot of nostalgia for Stalin on the part of the people.
"Stalin - the director is keen to say - is perceived differently today than he was then, a bit like you do for Togliatti and Gramsci".
(HANDLE).
