Koktebel DVD, 2003

What is immediately striking about Khlebnikov and Popogrebsky’s debut film about a phlegmatic father and his 11 year-old son travelling across land from Moscow to the Crimea is its complete assurance. You know immediately you’re in good hands. An early scene is telling. We see the boy sitting in a cattle truck on a train, staring out of the open door at the passing scene. The camera slowly concentrates its gaze on his head to the exclusion of everything else while the iron sound of wheels on rails becomes dominant until we are as mesmerised by the internalised rhythm of travel as he is.

The film is also good at portraying the temporary liaisons that travel brings – with a unexpectedly hospitable railway worker, an alcoholic recluse, a village doctor. An understated tone of initial threat in the encounters comes from being exposed and homeless. More often than not hospitality and jokes follow. This is never overplayed though, with the tone similair to the quiet humour of Iosseliani’s Monday Morning. The directors are well aware too that the memories that linger longest are the quiet ones: the son pretending to smoke a cigarette with an older girl while sitting on a tree stump, looking at a pond and the edge of a birch wood and listening to the birds.

Landscape is in fact integral to the conception of the story - it is a film of tracks, forests and wide open spaces. Brilliantly though (and taking its cue from Tarkovsky), the directors realise that any film that is so grounded must also embrace the dream of flight. Conversations feature albatrosses and gliders; the boy can see himself from the air. Even the puddles reflect the sky.

Both Koktebel and The Return are from young directors who are part of the so-called ‘New Wave’ of Russian Cinema. If there are more films like this in store, then we’re in for a real treat.

Graeme Hobbs on 25th February 2005
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