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PREPARE YOURSELVES FOR A HARSH, CRUEL, SHOCKING FILM
29/08/2007
“Prepare yourselves for a harsh, cruel, shocking film,” were the words with which Italian screenwriter Giorgio Arlorio introduced the first official screening of Venice Days, Cargo 200 by Alexei Balabanov. The audience took a noticeable deep breath and the lights went down…
Indeed, the harsh, cruel film did shock and certainly left no viewers indifferent: the director himself says people either hate him for it or call him a genius though the overall reaction was positive as the lively Q&A following the screening proved.
Based on true events – some that happened to Balabanov, others gathered from the news or stories he heard during his days as an assistant director and researcher of documentaries – Cargo 200 takes its title from the code name of the cargo loads of the cadavers of Soviet soldiers who died in Afghanistan. However, the thrust of the film centers on a young girl who is kidnapped and subjected to humiliating sexual and emotional abuse, whose story is interwoven with that of a prim university professor of scientific atheism traveling to visit his mother, all against the backdrop of the Soviet war in Afghanistan in late 1984.
While many see in the film a metaphor for the difficult social and economic situation in which Russia finds itself today, Balabanov insists he is not so fatalistic about his country’s future, and that his intent was simply “to show the climax of the last ten years of the death of that country…because I think it really was dead then.”
However, the film’s finale does offer a glimpse of things to come, of a society that renounced one set of ideals for another virtually overnight: from mass atheism to mass religion, from anti-capitalism to an oligarchy governed by a small class of the extremely rich, who made their millions ruthlessly exploiting the country’s transition period.
Winner of the Critics Prize at the Sochi Film Festival, the film traveled the Russian festival circuit before becoming an unexpected hit at home upon its release two months ago – it has garnered nearly 200,000 admissions and $800,000 at the box office so far.
As Cargo 200 is making its world premiere here at Venice, Balabanov was asked about its prospects for international distribution, to which he responded with characteristic self-irony: “I don’t know, I’m not a producer or distributor. I just make films.”
Natasha Senjanovic
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