Malenkaya Vera

Vasili Pichul’s film was shot in his home town of Mariupol in Ukraine and takes a piercing look at the darkest recesses of everyday life in the Soviet Union. It tells the story of the young Vera, who gives the film its name; she lives a life full of sexual and intellectual freedom, but is repeatedly brought back down to earth by the depressing, degenerate home where she lives with her parents. The corporeality and occasional stabs of violence that seem to inform the handheld camerawork and the direction of actors make MALENKAYA VERA one of the most unflinching works permitted within Soviet cinema and is exemplary of the desperate, defiant youthful anger that formed in the cinema of the Perestroika era. (nf/gv)