Director Evgeny Tsymbal and producer Alexander Smolyansky present and discuss their new documentary In Search of a Lost Paradise / В поисках потерянного рая (52m): the story of two artists, endowed with love and talent, trying to live in personal and artistic freedom in a totalitarian regime. This film belongs to Alexander Smolyansky, who co-wrote the script and filmed the most important interview. This is a Pushkin Club event and all are welcome. Film in Russian with English subtitles; Q&A in Russian and English.
In Search of a Lost Paradise tells the story of the artist Valentina Kropivnitskaya and her husband, the artist Oskar Rabin. They embodied the idea of nonconformist art, later called the Second Russian Avant-Garde.
In 1974, the couple organized a prohibited open-air art exhibition, smashed by KGB bulldozers the day it opened, and publicized worldwide the day after. Shortly thereafter, the couple was exiled from the USSR and stripped of their citizenship - and the Soviet government went on to relax its position on art.
Tsymbal, one of the most internationally acclaimed contemporary Russian documentary film makers, tells the story of an artist who was true to her talent and never gave into the pressures of life.
The film has just become a winner of the Portsmouth film festival. READ MORE
Director: Eugene Tsymbal; Screenwriters: Eugene Tsymbal, Alexander Smoljanski; Cameramen: Victor Dobronytsky, Alexander Smoljanski; Producer: Alexander Smoljanski.
Duration: 52 minutes; in Russian with English subtitles
FULLY BOOKED
Evgeny Tsymbal is the only BAFTA-winning Russian film director. Little known to mainstream film goers, he is well respected in Russian and European artistic and intellectual circles as a documentary filmmaker, writer and film historian.
Alexander Smoljanski started this documentary project in 2008. After four years of extensive researching, writing, interviewing and filming he invited director Eugene Tsymbal into this project. They finished the movie in spring of 2015 and since then the film attracted a considerable attention of international public and cinema professionals.