Studiocanal’s Vintage World Classics collection is about to get bigger and better next month with the release of two seminal works by female director Kira Muratova. Available for the first time in the UK restored in 4K on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital will be Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell.
Regarded as one of the leading figures in Ukranian and Russian cinema, an Ukranian film director, screenwriter and actress of Romanian/Jewish descent. Kira Muratova’s work was overlooked for many years due to the censorship of her early films in the Soviet Union with Brief Encounters was banned for twenty years and The Long Farewell for 17 years.
She still managed however to build a very successful film career from the 1960s onwards due to her boundary pushing directorial approach and aesthetics, and received awards during Perestroika including the People’s Artist of Ukraine Award (1989), the Shevchenko National Award (1993), the Oleksandr Dovzhenko State Award (2002), five Nika Awards (Russian Oscars) as well as many international accolades and screenings of her films at the Cannes, Venice and Berlin Film Festivals.
Muratova spent much of her artistic career in Odessa in Ukraine and made nearly all of her films at Odessa Film Studios. Her work has been celebrated by film scholar and critic Dr Elena Gorfinkel as “one of the most distinctive and singular works of world filmmaking.”
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS (1967) was the debut feature from Kira Muratova, and shows the beginnings of her impressionistic style, blending observational realism with new wave experimentation. Through an intricate play of flashbacks and shifting perspectives, Brief Encounters reveals the intricate love triangle, connecting a hard-nosed city planner (played by Muratova herself), her free-spirited geologist husband (legendary Soviet protest singer Vladimir Vysotsky), and the young woman from the countryside (Nina Ruslanova in her breakout role) whom she hires as their housekeeper. Muratvoa crafts a wryly perceptive portrait of two very different women connected by chance yet each navigating her own dreams, ambitions and disappointments.
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS:
–New Interview with Dr. Elena Gorfinkel
–New Isabel Jacobs on Brief Encounters
–New Video essay by Masha Shpolberg
Filmed in 1971, Kira Muratova’s THE LONG FAREWELL was banned and shelved, not to be screened in Perestroika until 1987. The film focuses on the story between a single mother and her teenage son. Evgenia (Zinaida Sharko) and Sasha (Oleg Vladimirsky) have a close relationship, but adolescence spells dark clouds on the horizon. After a visit to his father, Sasha becomes increasingly taciturn, looking to break away from the overprotection of his mother and live instead with his father. Muratova’s editing and framing creates a coming-of-age tale in which the standard push-pull of dramatic tension is diverted elsewhere, providing a sharp-edged, biting look at a parental relationship drifting apart.
THE LONG FAREWELL:
– New Interview with Dr. Elena Gorfinkel
– New Isabel Jacobs on The Long Farewell
Studiocanal will release Brief Encounters and The Long Farewell on Blu-ray, DVD and Digital from 18th September.
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