Window to Paris

The music teacher Nikolai is thrown out of his job and sleeps in a gymnasium until he can find somewhere to live. In the end he is given a small room in a communal flat in Petersburg. There is a cat that has been shut in the room, and it is surprisingly healthy. Together with the neighbours he works out the secret: the window of the room opens onto Paris. What follows is the question of who will use the discovery and how. Yuri Mamin's film goes straight at Russia in the early nineties, but it does not let the West off either: Paris here is not a paradise, just a different kind of squeeze. Comedy and sadness keep changing places, and in the end the question arrives somewhere: can a person leave the place they were born, and should they? The film won the audience award at the Berlin Film Festival and took a number of prizes in Russia. Sergey Dreyden plays Nikolai.