Kira MURATOVA Кира МУРАТОВА Kira MOURATOVA   Russia / Ukraina, 1997, 116 mn  Colour, fiction

Three Stories ▪ ▪ ▪ ▪ ▪ ▪ ▪ Три истории    Trois histoires  Tri istorii

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Plot synopsis

1. "Boiler-House No. 6"
Written by Igor' Bozhko, with assistance from Evgenii Golubenko.
With Sergei Makovetskii, Leonid Kushnir, and Jean Daniel
A man goes to see his former schoolmate working at a boiler house and persuades him to burn in the furnace the corpse of his communal flat neighbor whom he has just murdered after a quarrel.

2. "Ophelia"
Written by Renata Litvinova.
With Renata Litvinova, Natal'ia Buz'ko, and Ivan Okhlobystin
An orphaned girl gets a job in the archives of the maternity home to find out the identity of her mother who abandoned her years earlier. She finds her, befriends her and takes the first opportunity to throw her into the sea.

3. "The Little Girl and Death"
Written by Vera Storozheva, with assistance from Kira Muratova.
With Oleg Tabakov and Lilia Murlykina
An old intellectual tries to explain to the neighbor's five-year-old daughter "all the abomination of her lumpen existence". The girl feeling hurt for her mother decides to poison the old man with arsenic.

 

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Commentaries and bibliography

 

On the surface, Kira Muratova's Three Stories is a harsh, cruel, unjust film: three variations on the theme of the total dismemberment, degradation, and degeneracy of Homo sapiens... The enigma, however, is that this absolutely deconstructivist take on reality is cast in a strikingly harmonious, balanced, aesthetically complete form. However you analyze it, the film evinces an utter deliberateness at every turn-each frame, word, sound, patch of color, intonation... Everything is connected to everything else, and the longer you scrutinize this crystalline lattice-work of a film, the more meanings and ideas emerge. Against the background of the complete aesthetic collapse of post-Soviet cinema, such an artistic accomplishment seems almost a miracle. -Natalia Sirivlia, Entsiklopediia kino

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Selected in the following festivals :

- Rotterdam International Film Festival, Rotterdam (Netherlands), 2013

- Odessa International Film Festival, Odessa (Ukraine), 2010

- Festival of Central and Eastern Film , Wiesbaden (Germany), 2009

- Moscow International Film Festival (MIFF), Moscow (Russia), 2009

- Festival Russian kino 'Moscow Premier Screenings', Moscow (Russia), 2008

- Retrospective Kira Muratova, Moscow (Russia), 2008

- Honfleur Russian Film Festival, Honfleur (France), 1998

- Berlin International Film Festival : Berlinale, Berlin (Germany), 1997

- "NIKA" Prizes, Moscow (Russia), 1997

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