Note : In late 1990s Russia, plagued by the complicated transition from planned to market economy, people labor as best they can to improve their own beleaguered lives. Russian writer-director Alexei Mizgirev follows his debut Hard-Hearted with an emotionally complex sophomore effort addressing this dire situation and introduces Yekaterina Artemovna, a lonely, embittered librarian living in a remote mining settlement who struggles to balance ethics, love and the brutal facts of her daily survival. One day, a civic-minded man in a naval uniform appears and changes everything. The hopeless monotony of Yekaterina’s daily life abruptly ends, but sadly, not for long. Through the drama and cruelty his female protagonist suffers, Mizgirev gives a remarkable portrayal of the limits of human endurance in the face of despair, and provides a dramatic rendering of a Russia desperately seeking a more merciful future. A multiple winner at the 2009 Locarno International Film Festival, including Best Director. (http://miami.bside.com/2010/films/bubenbaraban_miami2010)
Plot synopsis
The heroine is a lonely woman of forty-five, who runs a library, while the story is set in a small mining settlement. Once love enters her life, it seems to give a meaning to her continuing struggle with the grinding poverty, despair and emptiness that surround her. She inherits her father’s apartment, and perhaps now she will no longer have to steal books from the library and sell them in the railway carriages of the trains that stop at the local station.
But her lover leaves
her for her best friend, she understands that the only thing she can
do is revenge – a bitter feeling of the one who cherishes the few good
things she had in her life.