A Gentle Creature

Synopsis

“A captivating, hallucinatory plunge into Russia’s atrophied civil society, in which a woman’s search for answers is rewarded with humiliation and abuse. Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries are conceived as silent commentary: His rigorously edited, coolly composed shots contain all the information needed for viewers to feel the weight of his argument. By contrast, his fiction films (My Joy, In the Fog) play with storytelling in a freewheeling way, combining narrative and cinematic audacity in scenes that shift from the sublime to the phantasmagoric. After five years of canonical nonfiction from the director, it’s something of a shock to watch A Gentle Creature, a dense, nightmarish feature that takes aim at Russia’s befouled soul, in which a nameless woman tries to learn why the package she mailed to her prisoner husband was returned without explanation. Her hellish journey through a society stripped of humanity forms a challenging, at times darkly humorous and ultimately eviscerating vision of surrealistic nihilism that’s unmistakably Russian in style and bleakness.” (Jay Weissberg, Variety)

Around The World in 14 Films 2017, presented by Ulrich Matthes – in attendance of actress Vasilina Makovtseva