The Inner Circle

A young film projectionist in Moscow is taken from his home one night and driven to the Kremlin. The job he is given is to run Stalin's private screenings. It puts him in the room with the most powerful man in the country and at the same time ties his whole life to the state: he cannot even tell his new wife what he does. As the years pass, he turns never questioning anything he sees into a way of staying alive. Andrei Konchalovsky's film rests on a real person, the projectionist who served Stalin for years. Its actual subject is not the dictator but how devotion to him blinds an ordinary man to his own family. The character is most disturbing in the moments when he chooses not to see what the man he loves has done. Tom Hulce plays the projectionist and Bob Hoskins the head of the secret police. It was shot as the Soviet Union was breaking up and was among the first large co-productions made in Moscow.