Bread Day preceded by The Train Stop

Director: Sergei Loznitsa, Sergei Dvortsevoy

1998 / 80min / DCP

Every Tuesday, the scant elderly residents of an isolated, nearly abandoned village outside St. Petersburg push an unmanned train car along a spur off the main line that leads into town, supplying themselves and their neighbors with a week’s daily bread—a ritual that, in Dvortsevoy’s hands, appears as both a miracle of tenacity and a pointed commentary on systemic dysfunction. Screens with The Train Stop, Loznitsa’s sumptuously photographed record of sleepers in a station waiting room.

“In Loznitsa’s The Train Stop, in the middle of the night, the train doesn’t arrive. The waiting room is full of heavy sleepers, some folded over on their laps, some splayed out over the benches. What could rouse them? Maybe the answer is not a train, but a film. Consider Dvortsevoy’s similarly existential Bread Day. Sure, the rickety cart carrying the week’s delivery of bread to Township 3 of Zhikharevo barely seems to count as a train. It’s manually pushed by the pensioners who will soon argue strenuously with each other as they divvy up its contents. But their shouting is so vigorous, their insults so inventive, that questions of categorization quickly dissipate as the elderly residents, their goats in tow, battle to have the last word.” —Series curator Genevieve Yue

The Train Stop (Sergei Loznitsa, 2000, 25 mins)

Bread Day (Sergei Dvortsevoy, 1998, 55 mins)

Introduction by Genevieve Yue on Saturday, September 5th

Part of Trains: Local Routes