Chekist

Srubov runs a provincial Cheka office during the civil war and chairs the three man commission whose only function is to decide, in minutes, who is to be shot. Aleksandr Rogozhkin builds the film on the ordinariness of that work. There is no hero and no turning point, only a procedure that repeats and a man who comes apart while carrying it out. Rogozhkin does not look away from the executions; he repeats them, and that is what makes the film so hard to sit through. It comes from Vladimir Zazubrin's 1923 novella The Splinter, which stayed unpublished until 1989. Zazubrin himself was shot in 1937. It screened at Cannes in 1992 in Un Certain Regard.