The Student

Synopsis

“Kirill Serebrennikov’s study of a problem teenager’s religious awakening is as aesthetically kinetic as it is intellectually rigorous. There was a time when scores of defiant adolescents asserted intellectual independence from their parents by turning their backs on religion. In this more agnostic age, picking up the Bible can be just as startling an act of rebellion in many households. So it proves in Kirill Serebrennikov’s splendid “The Student”, a stormy, swoon-inducingly shot bout of Russian moral wrestling that hits as hard and as heavily as a nastoyka hangover. Though Serebrennikov clearly takes a side in this rhetorical battle between an aggressively Christianized high-schooler and his liberal, Jewish-born biology teacher, this is a welcome study of religious fanaticism that doesn’t discredit either party’s intelligence, and knows its oats either way: Viewers who are either unfamiliar with or estranged from the Good Book should prepare themselves for a veritable tsunami of scripture, rigorously extracted and reassembled as riveting spiritual debate. (…) “The Student” is a film that never stops to think; it thinks (and speaks, and shouts) while prodigiously on the move.” (Guy Lodge, Variety)

Around The World in 14 Films 2016, presented by Ulrich Matthes – in attendance of director Kirill Serebrennikov