Man from Podolsk

Nikolai lives in Podolsk, works at a local paper, dreams of making music and keeps an odd devotion to Amsterdam. One day he is detained in Moscow with no reason given. He braces himself for humiliation; but the police in front of him are nothing like the police he knows. They are polite, cultivated, unnervingly well informed, and they ask him questions about his own life that he cannot answer. Semen Serzin's film is adapted from Dmitry Danilov's play, which won Russia's leading theatre award in 2018. The telling sits close to Kafka: the distance between funny and threatening closes and the audience cannot tell them apart. The question the film puts is why a person notices so little of their own life, and who has any standing to ask them about it. It premiered at Kinotavr.