BARABANIADA

The clumsy, airy-fairy drummer of a funeral orchestra inhibits a mysterious „Stradivari“-drum from a buried musician, which he will never get rid of. The drum accompanies this Russian Buster Keaton with stubborn obstinacy while he aimlessly staggers through a nightmare-land of grotesque tragicomical events – the former Soviet imperium characterized by decline, corruption, violence and social misery. Drummer and drum finally end up at an enormous garbage dump where macabre „friendship-meetings“ take place with American homeless people who invite the drummer and his drum to visit New York. All this is told in the spirit of E.T.A. Hoffmann, in which reality is a dream and the dream is reality, without a single word, only through a fascinating unity of visual and musical rhythm. In 1996, Sergej Ovčarov received an award as „Director of the Year“ from the Berlin Academy of the Arts for this film.