Radio Day

Radio day is being celebrated in Russia. A station is preparing a live broadcast for it; famous bands will come, the presenters will perform and donations will be collected. In the morning there is a problem: the bands do not arrive. Then a story breaks; a ship is stuck at sea with animals on board. The team turns it into programming. As the broadcast goes on the story grows, details are invented, and listeners start giving money. At a certain point what is being described has no connection to anything real. Nobody stops it because the ratings are rising. Dmitriy Dyachenko directs. Leonid Barats, Nonna Grishaeva, Aleksandr Demidov and Rostislav Khait are in the cast. It is a Russian production. The film was adapted from a play by the theatre company Kvartet I and the actors perform a text they wrote themselves; the same company appears together in other films. The narrative takes place within a single day and almost in one location. The matter it treats is the manufacture of news; a lie is enlarged to fill the airtime. The humour rests on talk and the density of lines is high. The film worked in Russia and is among the company's best known works. The narrative does not show the radio staff as ill intentioned; nobody plans anything and the situation grows by itself. The truth comes out at the end and the result does not go where expected. Its limit is accessibility; the jokes depend on Russian popular culture and are lost in translation. Who it is for: viewers who like Russian comedy and satire about the media. Who it is not for: it is local, confined to one place, and the ending scattered.