Natalya Yegorova Movies

Barak is a simple portrait of the inhabitants of an old barracks converted to a communal residential neighborhood in a provincial town in the Urals in 1953, during the postwar rebuilding following the death of Stalin. The community is almost self-contained, which sets an example for the lives and loves of ordinary people in the rest of the Soviet Union during a period of upheaval. Twenty-three year old Olga, the sole survivor of a family wiped out in the siege of Leningrad, is the latest arrival to the barracks, where she does not know anyone. Alexei, a militia man, lives with his son Burka and his girlfriend Claudia. Jewish Jora, an eccentric photographer-cum-clown, is a former victim of Stalin's purges. Friedrich is an ex-Nazi soldier married to a Russian. Guerka is an alcoholic dove breeder and a former Nazi collaborator. Polina is a pretentious Ukrainian and Karim the Tatar is her companion. Olga gradually adjusts herself to the circumstances, living each day with moments of joy, sorrow, and unexpected incidents. Director Valeri Ogorodnikov pays attention to the minutest details when drawing a colorful gallery of characters. Dream sequences are interspersed for dramatic highlights. Barak received the Silver Leopard at the 1999 Locarno International Film Festival, and Ogorodnikov received the Young Jury award. ~ Gönül Dönmez-Colin, All Movie Guide

Andrei is buff, he is muscular, he is ready to bash heads whenever and wherever his much-worshipped mother directs, and his gang is similarly buff, similarly ready to follow the lead of Andre's mother. He has lived a life of competition and conflict with true Russian heroes like his father, who he believed died in Afghanistan, and enemies like Jews and foreigners. For him, after his lounge-singing mother, the muscular movie-star Arnold Schwarzenegger is a god. His mother is a piece of work, using her incestuous relationship with her son to motivate him to go off on rampages to satisfy her bile against all "non-Russians." One day she gets drunk and reveals that Andrei's father is not the soldier he always thought he was, but a Jewish composer and conductor. Thinking she has fashioned her son into the perfect instrument for revenge, she tells him how his father seduced her (making her pregnant) and then did not cast her as a singer for an important role, which blighted her career after that. When Andrei looks up his newly revealed father, he finds an impoverished, gentle man who lives in such chaos that a few new holes in the wall, put there in an anti-Semitic rage by the boy, have no effect on him. Instead, he is proud of his newfound son. Before long, the charms of gentleness and civility have won him over, and he realizes that he must protect his father against his mother and his former gang, still loyal to her wishes. In a film-making note, industry insiders said that many of the skinheads in the gangs in this movie were the genuine article, which lent a specially chilling realism to their anti-everybody performances. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide

Director Sergei Mikaelyan, known for his 1974 release Premium, takes a look this time at how romance can blossom between the most unlikely people. Oleg (Oleg Yankovsky) is a handsome factory worker with a relentlessly boring job that leads him to spend a lot of time socializing with his buddies and drinking. Vera (Yevgenia Glushenko) is a plain-looking librarian from a physically unattractive family who has never been able to develop a romantic liaison with anyone. When she meets Oleg, she tries to get him interested in books; she wants him to see his life differently, to appreciate his work and maybe not drink so much. At first Oleg shuns her, but in the end she prevails, and he begins to see himself and her in an entirely new light. For her role as Vera in this easy-going romantic story, Yevgenia Glushenko won the "Best Actress" award at the 1983 Berlin Film Festival. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide