Friend

Looking for the price of a drink, an alcoholic is given a Newfoundland dog by a stranger at a bird market. He soon finds out that the animal can not only talk but can also get him to give up drinking. From then on the man is determined to be rid of the dog, and that turns out to be anything but easy. The film sets a fairy tale invention beside the everyday reality of addiction and knows how to hurt while it makes you laugh. The talking animal is not a children’s story device here; it works like the sound of the man’s own conscience. Sergey Shakurov appears in Leonid Kvinikhidze’s eighty three minute Soviet production, completed in 1988.