My Friend Ivan Lapshin

1935, a town in the Soviet provinces. Ivan Lapshin, the head of the police, is hunting a gang. He shares a flat with a journalist friend, is in love with an actress, and she loves someone else. The film does not narrate these events; it shows them as a child remembers them years later, scattered and incomplete. Aleksei German directs. The narrator is the person who was a child in the flat where it happened. The production history matters as much as the narrative. It was shot between 1979 and 1982, finished, and shelved; Soviet censorship would not release it. It only reached cinemas in 1985, at the start of perestroika. German's earlier films had met the same fate. What the censors objected to was not the subject but the tone. The film shows 1935, immediately before the Great Terror, without heroism and without accusation: people living in cramped rooms, celebrating, singing, unaware of what is coming. The image keeps changing, moving between black and white and sepia, with colour surfacing only at a few moments. It imitates the disorder of memory itself. Who it is for: viewers who want the most demanding branch of Soviet cinema and narratives built on memory. Who it is not for: the plot is deliberately impossible to follow. Nobody is introduced and the film makes no information easy.