My Friend Ivan Lapshin

Director: Aleksei German

1984 / 100min / 35mm

Adapted from short stories written by the director’s father, the popular writer Yuri German, My Friend Ivan Lapshin features a present-day narrator looking back on a youth spent in a communal apartment in the fictional city of Unchansk circa 1935, when one was expected to speak of Joe Stalin, even in the semi-privacy of home, as something akin to a god, and when to comment on the privations of daily life or the preponderance of black market profiteers in the streets was tantamount to treason. A film rich with incident and interwoven subplots, its nostalgia tinged with wry irony (Stalin’s Great Purge lays immediately ahead), recalling Henry James’s What Maisie Knew in its filtering a tale of adult romantic goings-on through the blinkered perspective of a quietly observant child.

Distributor: Seagull Films