Stefaniya Stanyuta Movies
- 1991
Izrail (Jossi Pollak) is an incredibly strong man, and in this harrowing drama, he needs to be. As the Nazis advance across Europe, he manages to flee with his family into the Ukraine, settling them into the rural life there. However, once the Nazis overrun the place, his Jewishness is exposed. The invaders plan to execute him, but then an important general's horse dies, and his captors hit upon the (to them) humorous idea of hitching this strong man to the traces. Then they decide it would be fun to see how he would do in competition with a real horse. They tell him he will only see his wife and children alive if he can beat a real horse in a race. Somehow he survives and returns to his ravaged village. What he finds there robs him of his immense strength once and for all. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Jossi Pollak, Stefaniya Stanyuta, (more)
- 1984
In a tale that skillfully captures the essence of a child's naivete and independent spirit, Senka (Alyosha Vesselov) is puzzling over his mother's announcement that a baby brother is on the way. After some consultation with his friend Matruska (Yulia Kosmacheva) about whether babies come from storks or from the cabbage patch, the two let the question stand. When Senka's mother has to go to the hospital, he and Matruska get into a bit of mischief but are helped out by a kindly widow. To Senka's dismay, he finds out on his mother's return that his baby brother is really a baby sister. Definitely at odds with this news, especially since he's been scolded so much recently, Senka and Matruska take the baby out to the cabbage patch and drop it off for the nice nurse who is going to be married soon. Fortunately, the ever-vigilant widow is nearby and sees all. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Alyosha Veselov, Yulia Kosmacheva, (more)
- 1981
This patriotic story is set in 1941 at harvest time in a bucolic Russian village -- someone is in the process of setting up a pole to support the loudspeaker that will transmit radio broadcasts, another is making plans for the coming spring, and a family of father, mother (pregnant with her third child), and elderly grandmother are taking care of their modest farm. The next thing anyone knows, a man on horseback arrives to announce that the Germans have invaded the Soviet Union, and before dreams of the future can be realized, the men of the village have been drafted and are heading out to battle. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Vladimir Gostyukhin, Valentina Fedotova, (more)
- 1981
In this visually evocative film about the conflicts between modernity and tradition, human feelings and human progress, a hydro-electric project is about to doom a 300-year-old Siberian village to a watery grave as the dam goes into effect and submerges the land. The spirit of the peasants and the past are concentrated in the image of one lone tree that defies almost all attempts to destroy it, and the engineers, who represent an irreversible progress, come walking out of the mist into the village like ghostly messengers of fate. Daria (Stefaniya Stanyuta) is an old woman who refuses to leave -- she washes her house down, preparing it for burial like a corpse, and both she and other elderly women walk into a morning fog as the last boat arrives to carry people to the mainland. Her son Pavel shouts for the disappearing "Matyora" (the name of the island) as he also heads into the mist. In a poignant prologue with significance on several levels, director Elem Klimov shows four men and one woman, wrapped in white, riding in a boat across a fog-covered river in silence. His wife Larissa Shepitko was supposed to direct this film but she and four crew members died in a car accident on the first day of location shooting, July 2, 1979. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Stefaniya Stanyuta, Lev Durov, (more)
