Vladimir Eisner

One family, one band. They seemed to be happy. A movie that investigates why these seemingly optimistic musicians suddenly saw no hope to continue living in USSR and tried to escape it by hijacking a plane.

“Prayer” explores the forms of human togetherness, of co-existence, as the familiar world comes apart: from Orthodox rites to crowds at rallies. Off-screen, an intense symphony of fragments — concert music, liturgical chant, noise, and a Babel of voices. Gradually, news footage enters the visual fabric, on both a local and cosmic scale: from the slaughter in Afghanistan to filming on the Mir space station.

To be thrown into the world, to pass through an enfilade of social roles, and to vanish. Is that the human lot? And how far is it fixed by milieu and era? “The Last Term” offers no answers, but poses these questions with a bluntness that spares neither the viewer nor the hero: Boris Efimovich Egorov, a veteran of the Great Patriotic War who became a professional thief, served time in prison, and is now living out his days in a retirement home, surrounded by other former criminals.

Filming for this picture took place in Russia over the course of a quarter of a century: in 2000, 2010 and 2022. The film is preceded by an epigraph: “The fate of every person depends on the country where they live, just as the fate of a country depends on its citizens”.

The story of Marshal Vasily Konstantinovich, a dedicated Red Army commander who was killed in Stalin's "purges." The film attempts to study the fate of the country through his biography, and unlock the riddle of the show trials of the thirties.

“The film is about one of the most terrible and difficult periods in the history of Russia of the 20th century, about the 90s of the last century. For many people it was a shock. The Empire collapsed, human relations and moral values collapsed. Crime and bandits were everywhere. And ordinary people were concerned about how to survive. This period was called perestroika. The people call this time a troubled time. The film reviews social processes from within, not from the outside propaganda side. Much for the modern spectator seems strange, it seems phantasmagoric, but it was so.” -V. Eisner

On the last in Russia narrow-gauge railway (UZhD), the felled timber is taken out. Together with the felled forest, the villages located nearby also perish. The void from the felling that has taken over everything around is getting closer and closer to the village where the heroes of the film live.

“Even someone who is not an actor acts while on set, though he is playing himself,” Eisner says in an interview. “A Quiet Monastery” is such a documentary performance. The performer is Bardiashvili, a watchman who looks into the camera with a gap-toothed smile and issues one piece of “everyday wisdom” after another. His stage is the construction site he guards and his native town, both resembling a post-apocalyptic landscape.