A Room and a Half

Veteran animator and documentary filmmaker Andrey Khrzhanovsky’s feature debut is a lyrical masterpiece bursting with images from the life of writer Joseph Brodsky. The brilliant Russian Jewish poet, who made his home in the United States after being expelled from the USSR in 1972, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987. Khrzhanovsky skillfully weaves a fictional account of an anonymous visit by an elderly, exiled Brodsky to his native St. Petersburg with the story of his growing up an only child in the rapidly changing post-WWII era. Conjuring a cinematic alchemy of music, animation and drama, the director also makes a nod to literature, creating for Brodsky his own filmic version of Remembrance of Things Past. As a young man, Brodsky—living under the repressive Soviet regime—asserted that Russia would be free when Pravda published Proust in its pages. Rarely has the city of St. Petersburg been captured as beautifully as in this nostalgic paean to childhood and a Soviet Union enamored of its poets and writers. Evoking Fellini and Tarkovsky, this extraordinary film features talking, hand-drawn cats and—in a magical moment—the animated flying exodus of musical instruments from the apartments of St. Petersburg’s Jews, who themselves remain gravity bound to the streets ruled by Joseph Stalin.