Hedy Lamarr in I Take This Woman, 1940
The whole world is three drinks behind. If everybody in the world would take three drinks, we would have no trouble. Of course, it should be handled in moderation. You should be able to handle it. I don’t think it should handle you. But that’s what the world needs, three more drinks. —Humphrey Bogart
She’s up there somewhere now. Maybe looking down at us. Maybe she sees us as tiny specks on the Earth’s surface, just like Sigmund Jähn did back then. The country my mother left behind was a country she believed in; a country we kept alive till her last breath; a country that never existed in that form; a country that, in my memory, I will always associate with my mother.
I am sadly not very well versed in Russian cinema. I’ve seen a few classics, but generally not from the 60s-70s, Russia’s heydey of film (or so I’m told).
Here are my current favorites:
Cold: About the deportation of Turkic peoples of the North Caucuses to Kazakhstan and Siberia in 1943 by Red…
“The Vanished Empire” is a great film that depicts an accurate image of the former Soviet Union during the 1970s. The film is set from the point of view of eighteen year old kids in Moscow and can be described as a coming of age tale of understanding love and friendship. The subtle representations of the Soviet era way of life should not be ignored. They illustrate the underground second society of the Soviet Union that was dominated by the black market, youth culture, and mass corruption. The film shows how different the USSR was from the United States. This film is culturally stimulating and represents a time that is lost forever.
