Alyonka

Director: Boris Barnet

1961 / 87min / 35mm

Set along the Kazakh steppe during Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands campaign, this exquisitely wistful road movie follows the titular young girl on her lorry ride to a town with a better school, exchanging alternately sad and amusing tales with her adult travel companions along the way. A significant appearance by Vasily Shukshin—a VGIK classmate of Andrei Tarkovsky and celebrated writer of the new rural literature that emerged during the Thaw—as a gruff tractor-driver who tells the ambivalent story of his rocky marriage to a refined city girl, signals Barnet’s keen awareness of the passage of time and its inevitable toll.

35mm print courtesy of Austrian Filmmuseum

One screening only!

Introduction by The Theater of the Matters and programmer Edo Choi on Saturday, April 11th

Part of Boris Barnet A Soviet Poet